Don Rickles Quotes

I do comedy shows. I make fun of myself, first of all.

There are jokes I know I want to tell, and there's sort of a rough order, but usually I try to change it up every show, to improvise and talk with the audience. I think when you tell jokes, if you're not careful, you can end up telling the whole list of jokes and then that's it. And that can get a little boring.

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

Neil Hamburger writes such cutting jokes.

I love hecklers. They remind you that you are a comedian.

I'm a good counter comedian. I can just work it off with looks, or have something crazy to say back. That works for me.

I'm pretty good at getting over people throwing stuff at me. If you've been doing stand up long enough you know how to swing back and get the laughs.

Anybody can go onstage and be dirty. You have to be funny, that's the key. You can say anything as long as it's funny. You can't take it too seriously up there. And people coming to see you can't take it too seriously.

Stand-up is an amazing art form, I think, because it's all about you having complete control of the situation, but absolutely none.

For aspiring comedians? Don't listen to me. Just go on stage and do what you think is funny.

Performing comedy, you develop a rhythm of ideas and laughs. I live for it.

As far as just my stand-up is concerned, I don't care about changing anyone's mind. I'm not making an argument. I'm a guy doing comedy.

What I do is, I make fun of people and I make fun of myself and things around us and exaggerate things. And I'm never mean-spirited. See, the word insult means some guy who's a real unkind human being. But I don't do that, because otherwise I wouldn't be headlining all these years, thank god, and all these people showing up to see me.

Stand-up in general is the most raw form of entertainment. There is no pyrotechnics or back-up dancers, it's just live and die by your jokes, that's it.

Whether you have a show or not, you can still be somewhere being funny.

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

I've never done a comedy club in my life. It's weird because I don't have the same background as most comics. I don't have a history of going up and only doing eight minutes.

You're always on duty because you're in a constant state of observation. That's one of the challenges of being a comedian. I think one of the other challenges is that, whether we like it or not, it's a profession that requires failure. It doesn't just encourage failure. It requires it because it's all trial and error. You need to know what doesn't work to know what works.

Stand-up comedy had an interesting effect on me in terms of how I started to think about constructing things, because I really loved the interstices, the linkages, or lack thereof.

I do a lot of talking, playing with the audience, but I don't really know what that's going to be. Somebody kind of feeds me cold. He gives me these kind of cold games that I play with the audience or quizzes that I do with them.

I got into stand up just to do stand up because I love stand up.

When you're a young comedian the first thing you want to do is get a laugh.

Those of you who are not aware of my brilliant career as a stand up comic, I'm not aware of it either so we might well wonder what we're doing here.

When you do stand-up, you're just concerned with trying to leave with some semblance of human dignity at the end of your performance.