Jermaine Fowler Quotes

I can work as a writer, but I wanted to do stand-up.

Standup led me to acting because I liked standup, and I saw people on a stage, and the closest, nearest thing to me was doing plays. It was like, that's the same thing as standup - people are on a stage; they're being seen and saying things - so, because of my love of standup, I moved towards acting.

I started performing non-professionally at birthday parties and family gatherings doing 'Saturday Night Live' impressions at four. Then I started for real at seven.

I started doing standup when I was in college, and I would incorporate a lot of characters into my act.

I was at college doing performing arts, and just spending all my time mucking about, and the lecturers thought I would be pretty good at stand-up, so I gave it a whirl.

Stand-up was my entree into the entertainment world. I didn't have to act out somebody else's words. I could just stand there with a microphone, and nobody would interrupt me. It's the most narcissistic thing you could probably do.

I've been a comedian since I was fourteen. But I've never really been a CEO.

I always want to go back and do stand-up; I like the freedom.

I don't have a specific plan except for as long as people want to listen to me talk, I'm going to keep talking. I can't imagine a life without doing standup.

I think I probably would have gone into stand-up.

I started standup at age nineteen. I decided that the only way I was going to try show business as a career was if I could make total strangers laugh.

No, I never really set out to be a stand up. I wanted to be a writer of some sort. I thought I'd do a bit of stand up and hopefully that will lead to stuff and little did I know it kind of snowballed. Before I knew it I was doing stand up 300 nights a year.

The moment for me, thinking I might actually want to do comedy professionally, was when I did public speaking at school. I found out I was good at getting up in front of class. In the fifth grade, I did a speech on comedy.

A lot of people get into stand-up as a back door into acting or something. But I really like writing jokes and telling jokes.

I thought I could see how standup worked. I never thought of being an actor - or anything else, really - but I thought, 'I can see how you get on stage and tell jokes.'

I really admire stand-up, and I think I would have loved to learn how to do it. I think it's terrifying and thrilling. A really cool thing to do. It's a dying art, in a way.

Some people use stand-up to get something else in their careers, but it's truly the art form of stand-up I love.

I love being on stage, I love being able to tell a story, I love the fact that the audience listens and laughs at it. It makes me happy, and it's what I live for.

I still do standup.

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

I started doing my own animated movies when I was in ninth grade; that's when I got the filmmaking bug. When I was about 16, I started writing jokes for doing stand up, and then I was 19 and started doing stand up.

I've done comedy most of my career, which I love, but I wanted to expand.

Once I started doing stand-up, everything fell into place. That was when I started acting more; I felt like I'd found my place in the business.

I had no intention of being an entertainer.

I definitely am a performer, and there are different styles of stand-up; I mean, some people are writers and they get onstage to get jokes out, and that's definitely not what I do. I like to just go up and, if I'm telling a story about someone, I'll play his or her part.