Paul F. Tompkins Quotes

It's quite frightening; the business of trying to be funny is very hairy. In comedy, the potential for humiliation is huge. Trying to be funny and failing is about the most embarrassing thing you can do.

Hanging out with comics, all they did was make fun of me.

I was the class clown, but I was a reluctant class clown because I was always and still am somewhat embarrassed by performing. I have terrible stage fright, and I don't like being in front of people.

Around year seven or eight, you'd kill yourself when you realized Norm had to enter and you had to come up with a new beer joke.

There is certainly a higher percentage of wit in British comedy than in American comedy. What always tickles me is the way in which people try to use their intellect to get themselves out of tricky situations but never quite manage to do so - much to their enormous embarrassment.

I feel like every day of my life is a funny wardrobe malfunction!

I used to do a lot of comedy. I don't know what happened. I think it's my face.

I failed to get into drama school, and my best friend told me I should do stand-up instead. I was always doing gags and voices, so he booked a gig for me without telling me. I only had four days to write it. I did a seven-minute set; the first four minutes were terrible, but the last two were amazing.

I told jokes badly.

I can never tell a joke, I've always found it easier to just fall over.

I don't really do stand-up.

I'm kind of a nerd. A square. And I'm terrible at telling jokes. I always forget the punch line.

Joan Rivers, who said to Marcel Marceau, Can we talk? Never got a dinner!

I’m a ridiculous person. If you take anything any comedian says seriously, then you’re stupid.

A comedian is not funny unless he is taking his demons out for a walk.

Steve Rannazzisi, Nick Kroll, Paul Scheer, Jon Lajoie - and they're such funny guys that they bring their own sort of twist to it all.

Some of my fear and anxieties surrounding faith, I think, provides some good comedy for my act.

I wasn't a great improviser when I started there; I'm not really up on current events. I would always just mug, just try to get my laughs from making faces. So I decided to do a character who should never have become a comic - somebody you would see at the Comedy Store and go, "This person is never going to make it."

That's a lovely experience when you make an audience laugh. Then the nerves go away for a bit. And sometimes you do things then that you've never done before that are really funny.

I have no more pleasure in hearing a man attempting wit and failing, than in seeing a man trying to leap over a ditch and tumbling into it

I'm not a big one for jokes. I can't tell a joke, believe it or not. If you gave me a thousand bucks and said, "Don, get up at a party and tell a joke," I'm the worst.

Most comedians come from a dark past and have a lot of sadness.

If you make a bad movie about stand-up, then comedians will mock you for the rest of your life.

I think the job of a comedian is to make people laugh, but also challenge them to laugh at things they didn't know they could until now.

Comedians have the ability to feel other emotions.