Ellen DeGeneres Quotes

When I'm doing stand-up, it's just me depending on me. I know how to go out there and make people laugh. I've been doing it since I was a teenager. I trust my instincts. I just go out and talk. A lot of the time I let the material come from the top of my head.

It's good to do stand-up. It kind of wakes you up and makes you feel like you're doing something. You got the crowd right there. That's all fun.

Stand-up is live, so I'm used to being live for most of my career. It's interesting.

When I do stand-up, I'm basically doing a one-man show.

When someone says to me, do you do stand-up I say absolutely not. I like to think of it as a theatrical performance. With me the show changes maybe five to ten percent every night. Of course, whatever I see in front of me and sometimes I get on a little run about it and it changes the show. And my delivery is such that people who have seen me many times say Gee, I never heard that before. Actually, they have, but I might have changed it around.

Standup is more me talking the entire time. There's definitely an exchange of energy because that room, that audience, is giving back.

You would never do stand-up without an audience. I mean, no one would even consider it. It's like they're the instrument you're playing.

I think that, for me, my favorite thing to do is perform standup onstage. Everything else I do is for the exposure to do more stand-up onstage, and for the money, and for the health insurance.

I don't really like doing big stand-up. Whenever I do theaters, I don't like 'em. I don't think they're right for stand-up. I've seen people in theaters, and it just doesn't work, because you're talking to the guy next to you the whole time.

Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me. Every night I had a live audience of 25,000 people to win over. My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.

I would love to do more on the stage; having actual contact with the audience is great. You can give them a good seeing to!

When I'm not on T.V. or working on a movie, I'm on the road doing stand-up. That's my roots.

Live stand-up is my thing. I love being on stage and just messing around.

A lot of comedians are really funny onstage, but they can't do a podcast.

What I really like about stand-up is there's 100 people in a room, and you can just feel the pulse. It's very human.

I don't write anything. It's all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don't sit down and write.

If I was at the Comedy Cellar at midnight you yelled at the back of the room. But you, for television, play it to the camera because yes you're communicating to the people at home using the studio audience that's right in front of you as a guide for that.

In 27 years doing this, I've seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo.

In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn't in the house last night, the designer wasn't there, the author's dead. It's just us and the audience.

My live performance, it just comes from feeling an energy and emotion from the crowd. Just going out there and doing my own stuff and being in front of my own people. I love it.

Stand-up is an amazing art form, I think, because it's all about you having complete control of the situation, but absolutely none.

In stand-up you can go either way. It's live. Somebody might say something in the crowd, you might respond to it. But in a movie you could be spontaneous too. But you pretty much have to stick to that story or that scene or that script, but in stand-up you can go wherever you want to. It's more freedom.

To this day, to this very day, except for television, I've never had a writer. Anything I've ever done on the stage, happened on the stage and I developed it from there. It started doing impressions and jokes - which I did very poorly. To this day I can't tell a joke. That sounds nuts, but it's true. I exaggerate it and it becomes a joke. Everything I've ever done I've done out on the stage and it became a performance over many many years.

Performing comedy, you develop a rhythm of ideas and laughs. I live for it.

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."