Kumail Nanjiani Quotes

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

As a comedian, I think you need to keep things real.

I told jokes badly.

There's a certain truism that you can't be self-conscious in comedy.

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

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.

Comedy is not something that a person can fake or learn how to do.

The really good stand up comedians can be angry but relatable, and they have interestingly humanizing personalities. Their observational skills are far greater than mine, so I'll just stick to reading lines off a page.

I was the kid who always hung back and then dropped the jokes when you least expected it. Timing was everything. My mouth sort of developed over time.

Actually, I think I'm funnier off-camera.

You can't just yell jokes at people.

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.

Something about not waiting for the laugh of a laugh track allows you to take lines that otherwise might be seen as just direct jokes, and make them seem realistic.

It is a great rush to come up with a joke that gets a good response from the audience. It's gold!

You don't need to be stable to be a stand-up comedian.

The jokes are great but what really matters for a comedian is his performance, his whole attitude, and the laughs that he gets between the jokes rather than on top of the jokes.

You say you're a comedian, you always have to be on guard.

I don't like comedians who don't have conviction, and with stand-up, it is always best to have an angle.

I've always been terrible on regular sitcoms with lots of jokes. I don't know how to tell jokes.

One joke coming from one person can land completely flat, while somebody else delivering it in a unique way can really elevate it.

It's one thing to be funny in a tweet. It is another to be funny for an hour.

Steven Wright can do Steven Wright very well. Not everyone can do Steven Wright's jokes with the same results.

To be honest, I wasn't the best stand-up comic.

I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.

I've got too much respect for stand-ups to call myself one.