Twinkle Khanna Quotes

I could never do stand-up because it's that thing of having to get up on stage. And out of every 10 jokes you tell, nine of them have to get a really good response.

When you're doing sketch comedy and you're pregnant, it's like wearing a giant sombrero in every sketch.

I just realized at a certain point that no matter how much writing I did, I'm still a gym rat for comedy clubs.

I don't have to write jokes. I don't have to write insults. If you ask the man of the hour in the hot seat, my mere existence is clearly insult enough.

I think most people that do comedy write for themselves. I don't think there is any other way you can do it, really. Otherwise it would be quite cynical.

I wish, in some ways, I was the type of comedian who could do something blistering and topical, but I'm the guy who gets stuck in the revolving door and thinks I should write about that.

I don't write my standup on paper or anything; but I just organically do it on stage, have an idea, chat it up a little bit. I'm keeping notes. I'm trying to keep up with this world and try to bring out a special every year.

I remember I used to go to The Laugh Factory and just goof off onstage, and then I'd see Dane Cook. He did a bit about his Mom making the bed in the summertime when he was a kid. He just said "Vroom!" and threw the sheet up in the air and the sheet would just stay over the bed for like a minute and a half. All he had were his arms out, but I could see the sheet. And he didn't do anything. He just kept it there. And I went, "I have to write more."

I've never written jokes. I mean, I'll write things on a piece of paper and riff on them onstage.

People need to write articles and they need to have angles in them and I'm grateful when people are doing articles, but I always say there's not a great mystery to stand-up comedy.

I'm not a comedy writer, I'm a comedian, so I only write stuff that I would want to say.

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not. So it's hard for me to come up with things, because I don't write stuff, I don't write my act down.

Doing comedy is as easy as doing anything else. You're dependent totally on the material.

I can work as a writer, but I wanted to do stand-up. And I knew I could, at worst, work as a stand-up. And I like to travel, and I knew I wanted to do an hour special, so in order to get ready for that, I had to hit the road.

If you think it's easy to write jokes about fried calamari, you've probably never tried.

The difference when I'm writing a story versus writing a joke is that writing a joke is so much more about the structure and it's less about the conversation. To me, the thing that I love about stand-up is the intimacy between performer and audience.To get it even more conversational was something that really appealed to me and that I really enjoyed doing. My early experiments with it, with just telling a story from my life on stage, it was so satisfying to do. And seemingly for the audience as well. It's a different thing, and it's a different feeling and a different vibe.

And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.

I never really write the jokes. I just sit down over a week or two and try to figure out what I want to talk about. Once I narrow that down, then I start working on the material, like "How do I make this stuff funny?"

At first I had no skills in writing comedy. I didn't know what a joke was, but, as someone once told me, your emotions follow your intent. If you create the intention of starting a comedy act, slowly your mind starts adjusting and you arrive at a new emotional state.

It's hard to get laughs when you're new.

I always loved comedy, but I never knew it was something you could learn to do. I always thought that some people are born comedians ... just like some people are born dentists.

The victory of the show is in the writing. Coming up with sketches and stand-up bits. The rest is just hitting buttons on a machine more or less.

I think there are so many little hurdles and impediments with stand-up that you'd need to have this insane desire to do it if you didn't have something that clicked right away.

My gift was in comedy. I found out I could make jokes. I could tell jokes. I could write them. So over the years, that's what I've done.

There are a lot of great jokes you can sit down and write, but that's just a written joke, versus the comedy of the situation. Ideally, you're pulling as much comedy out of the situation as you can.