Anthony Jeselnik Quotes

Everyone knows the feeling where you're in the pub and you make your mates laugh. It's awesome, you feel like you rock. That's what comedians want with a bit of extra ego.

Here's the thing, with comedy - and I learned this from Will Ferrell - you can't be ashamed. If you're doing comedy, you have to fully commit to the joke. Shame is not part of it. If you act shy or uncomfortable about your body, that makes the audience shy and uncomfortable. And in a comedy you just want them to loosen up and laugh.

Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience.

When you're doing stand-up, you can comment if something fails, get a laugh from that.

I think comedy is one of the hardest things to pull off. You either have timing or you don't, and that's something I don't have for sure.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

The misconception is that standup comics are always on. I don't know any really funny comics that are annoying and constantly trying to be funny all the time.

Whenever I go on a show with a comedian I just counter punch.

I like the purity of stand-up because it is all about whether people laugh at your jokes. Either they laugh or they don't.

The basic function of a comic is stand-up because it's so straightforward and simple. If the audience don't laugh, you didn't do your job. I've had some audiences where I didn't care if they laughed or not because they were either too drunk or stupid.

When you're a standup comic, you get up and you try stuff, and you're always kind of seeing how far you can push things.

How precise you need to be when you're in a comedy, and the honesty you need and to have those two things meet up and have the execution just right, I always found very difficult.

There's only one rule in stand-up, which is that you have to be funny. Yet 99 per cent of comics look and talk exactly the same.

I feel the life expectancy of a comedian is 30 seconds. If you don't hook an audience in half-a-minute, you're dead.

The thing with the comedian is you can make all the jokes you want and not every joke it going to be a winner, and not every joke is going to land, there'll be some that somebody doesn't laugh at, but that's just part of the deal.

I know what people like, and fortunately they seem to share my sense of humor.

We've all seen comedians look like they're reaching just a little bit too much for the laugh. This is counterproductive. The conceit of standup is that it is effortless, which makes the prospect of generating new comedy a tricky one: you are trying to be funny without looking like you are trying to be funny.

If you're not doing something or saying something in comedy, the camera is going to go somewhere else.

For a short period of time, I was like, I have these jokes and if people get them, they get them. And then eventually, I was like, Oh no. It's absolutely my job to convey to people why what I think is funny, is funny. The whole point of standup is to get the audience to understand your weird point of view.

I sometimes use a girl singer the way Henny Youngman uses his violin - as a bridge between one laugh and the next.

If you do live shows long enough as a comedian, you can still hear that rhythm of laughing. It's ingrained in you, and it's not something you can really teach somebody. It comes from doing hours and hours and hours and years and decades on stage, performing in front of live crowds.

I'd rather try and cram in another two gags than leave a pause to say, 'Hey, wasn't that bit funny?'

Mama is my chance to be a stand-up comedian. In my mind, it's my chance to be Chris Rock.

You have to know you are in a comedy. You have to know that you are actually allowing the audience to participate on some level. When you go dark and mean it, then you don't let them in.

I couldn't deliver a joke if you asked me to. It would have to be live and spontaneous. And that's what I was able to have in New York, at 9 o'clock in the morning, and people all over the country seemed to respond to it.