Steven Wright Quotes

As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

When you're doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.

With silly stuff, it's seventy-five percent confidence. I always tell people that it's because I'm nervous about getting that next laugh and I need to hear it. I always want to condense a joke.

I've never considered stand-up. Luckily I'm given great lines to say. I'm not sure how great my timing would be if I actually had to come up with my own jokes.

I am not a joke-teller. Stand-up, I couldn't do.

I had no desire to get up onstage and tell jokes. I prefer to stand next to really funny people.

I always wanted to be a stand-up comedian, even as a kid. Me and my dad would watch 'Evening at the Improv' on A&E.

Actually I never did stand up. I'm not that funny.

To be a comedian, you gotta jokesmith, there's no way around it.

I'm doing a lot of stand-up, but not like when you're living in New York and you can do three sets a night and it's your life, and you sleep all day and you wake up and you eat with a bunch of other comics and then get ready for the night.

I did stand-up for my grandparents every day when I was, like, eight.

My whole life, I've been telling jokes.

Stand up is really fun because if I think of a joke or a funny idea, then I can just go and tell some people and if they laugh, they laugh right away.

Stand-up is the kind of gig that'll show you where you're at.

I don't write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

I've been a stand-up comedian for years, and I can be silly.

A comedian is sort of like a wild animal. It really just depends on where you catch them. Sometimes they want to cuddle up, and sometimes they'll snap at you. But for me, more often than not, if I'm talking to somebody who makes their living in comedy, it'll be a very thoughtful conversation driven from an emotionally honest place.

I try to make the majority of my audience laugh. That's my audience. They'll laugh at the dead terrorist.

I got into stand-up to get on a sitcom.

You can't teach someone to be funny, but you can teach comic timing. If you listen to a good comic, you can learn how to put it on a page.

I'll do anything to get the laugh. I love it.

Coming up with comedy is hard, man. Those bits aren't easy to think of!

I was 18 when I started. I was hanging out with some friends and they asked if I had tried stand-up before. I hadn't, but I thought: 'What the hell?' So I went to an open mic night, and I liked it.

Stand-up is my baby.

A lot of people my age think stand up sucks.