Julian Barratt Quotes

I failed to get into drama school, and my best friend told me I should do stand-up instead. I was always doing gags and voices, so he booked a gig for me without telling me. I only had four days to write it. I did a seven-minute set; the first four minutes were terrible, but the last two were amazing.

I tried do stand-up, and I was horrible. And I'll never do it again.

When they first start doing comedy, new comics or even people that have only been doing it three or four years, they're doing an impersonation of a stand-up. This is what I think a stand-up should sound like.

My stand-up act is very clean.

The goal of almost every comic is to find a comedy voice - a specific point of view that an audience can latch onto.

There is nothing - nothing - like writing a great joke and having that joke kill onstage.

If you're a comedian, you are looking for material in daily life.

Specifically in stand-up, I love jokes. I love short, structured ideas and a punchline.

I don't play comedy as comedy. That would be the biggest trap. I think about the characters and their situations. Then you don't have to worry where the laugh is going to be. But comedy is harder than drama.

Most comedies are really hard to write, or to watch, because you kind of generally know what's coming.

I get very confused about being called a comedian, because when you say 'I'm a comedian,' people expect you to crack a joke. Maybe I use laughter and humour to make people think. I don't know what you call that - a humourist? A satirist? A pessimistic comedian? I don't know. Satirists can be very dark.

Like every comedian, if I heard a joke that I thought would work, I used it.

I love mixing horror with comedy.

Before 'SNL,' I would do stand-up, opening for Jeff Tweedy. It was worse than bombing in that people were dead silent.

There's only one rule in stand-up, which is that you have to be funny. Yet 99 per cent of comics look and talk exactly the same.

The thing that stand-up does for you is that it toughens you up a bit as far as the business goes. It's hard. If a joke doesn't get a laugh, that's instant rejection. And that's mostly what this business is most of the time: a lot of rejection.

I can't claim to ever have done stand-up.

I took a stand-up comedy class because I'd always wanted to.

I just like to build. Don't get me wrong: I think stand-up is great, and when someone like Richard Pryor or Steve Martin does stand-up, there's nothing better in the world. But I don't want to watch a lot of stand-ups for two hours. So I can do 45 minutes of stand-up and then say, 'Can we do something else now?'

Everyone was doing alternative comedy. I thought I'd distinguish myself by just telling jokes, with differing degrees of success.

Every comedian wants to play the London Comedy Store, and I was no exception.

There are certain types of stand-up, who are very successful, who do one type of joke, and never stray out of that. The audience knows that he's the depressive comedian, he's the up-beat, crazy comic. He's the one that talks about real life.

Bill Burr, Freddy Soto, Joe Rogan, Tom Segura… those people influenced me a lot more than any of the older guys like Richard Pryor.

Lots of people do stand up shows with no narrative, but I love a beginning, a middle and an end.

Too many comics today ramble. By the time they get to the punch line, the audience has either gone to sleep, gone to the bathroom or gone to bed.