Ron Shock Quotes

Richard Lewis is the master at taking a joke that he's told a million times in a row in the past year, on the road, and making it look like he's pulling it out of thin air.

My stand-up is quite good now, people say. It's just like a big conversation each time. Every gig is a rehearsal.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

I'm a frustrated stand-up comic. If you hand me a microphone and I get one laugh, then I'll go on for 20 minutes.

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

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

I had a flair for comedy and could give a sustained performance.

I know what's funny, and I probably know the best way to deliver the joke. Whether it's walking out of a room, facing that way, facing this way. I just have a sense of that.

Doing stand-up takes the fun out of being funny.

When they first start doing comedy, new comics or even people that have only been doing it three or four years, they're doing an impersonation of a stand-up. This is what I think a stand-up should sound like.

With most specials, even the best comedians will tell you they could have cut 15 or 20 minutes out of it.

When you improvise, you work off the laughs from the audience, but when you step on stage to do standup, it's silent.

Ninety-nine percent is in the delivery. If you have the right voice and the right delivery, you're cocky enough, and you pound down on the punch line, you can say anything and make people laugh maybe three times before they realize you're not telling jokes.

Soon I learned that the worse the puns and jokes, the funnier they could be, if you knew how to deliver them.

You learn what can become a good joke and can be repeatable. You have a shorthand about how to introduce a joke to someone.

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.

By the time I started doing stand-up, the club scene had died.

For a comedy to work, magic has to happen.

It takes many years to be a great comedian.

If I think something's funny, I try to mold it into a joke as soon as possible. Once I have a joke, I say it a million different ways on stage until I find a rhythm and it feels like it's as good as it can be.

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

It's very interesting, the joke comes first and then the wording comes within five seconds, maybe ten seconds. My thing is to get the joke across in as few words as possible. However, sometimes a word that's not really needed does help the rhythm of it. It's a gut feeling.

You can tell on-stage when a joke's starting to lose its pop. It doesn't mean people don't want to hear it anymore; it means I don't want to do it anymore. Because I want to move on to something that has a knee-jerk reaction just like you get when you tell somebody a joke that they've never heard.

The most frightening thing about playing Dick Gregory is I've never done stand-up before, and I had to learn how to be a stand-up comedian, which was a bit of a challenge.

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