Jon Richardson Quotes

I never used to tell jokes on stage. Now I'm cutting up jokes all night long.

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'm not a natural comic, I don't think. That's why I gave up stand-up. It was hard. It involved a lot of death. Dying. Dying on stage. But it's one of those jobs you can only learn by doing it.

Stand-up comedy is not a man's job. It's an alpha job: To be the only person in a room with a microphone who's allowed to talk.

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.

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

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

When you're a stand-up, you play in front of 600 people, and it's all about timing. I could never do stand-up comedy; it would be way too hard for me.

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.

Stand-up keeps you alive. It is definitely the most specialized field in comedy because you need to stay sharp and well-tuned every night.

It takes both courage and talent to stand up in front of fellow human beings and make them crack a smile, and at the same time keep it clean.

Comedy is something that I'm definitely looking to get into. I had a little taste of it and I do intend on going to classes for it because I think it's a different muscle, and it's hard to find female comedians.

The success of any stand-up act comes out of life experience.

I started by doing a little funny story, and then I started going to open mics. I realized I had a lot of work to do - you have to get over the stage fright and get your stage presence up. It took me some time, but I finally feel that I'm at a point where I feel comfortable on stage and giving my point of view.

Even when I was an engineer, I was a comic on my job. At birthday and holiday parties, I was the one scheduling and emceeing. If you work on your gift, and you're good, it will shine through.

Sometimes I start off shows by explaining to people that it's just a bunch of stories - I always say 'It's like standup, just less funny.'

I think, in a way, the stand-up prepped me for the improv, because I do a lot of riffing in my stand-up.

I thought that I was going to be a stand-up comedian or an actress. Turns out, I can't act my way out of a paper bag and stand-up comedy is a lot harder than it appears.

I definitely enjoyed being in front of an audience, making people laugh, and telling stories, so when I realized I could do all three at the same time, that was it.

I've been performing stand-up comedy for ten years, it's what I love and will always do.

I've done comedy on stage, in fact it is one of my strong points.

I think anybody in front of a crowd is a comedian.

When I was in third grade I taught myself ventriloquism... What's hard is to learn to be an entertainer and make people laugh. I was a few years out of college before I felt I had enough material. Then in 1988 I moved to L.A. and started to do some shows at comedy clubs.

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.

For me, the way I stay consistent is through stand-up comedy.