Lucas Neff Quotes

I don't consider myself a comic but a performer. A comic tells bad jokes.

With stand-up, there's a little bit of an exaggerated reality because things have to be manipulated to create comedy, to create jokes.

Stand-up came out of three things. Frustration, necessity and arrogance. I didn't have a great career ahead of me in anything. Someone literally said to me, 'You should try stand-up,' and took me to a venue.

But I love stand-up, and it's where I came from creatively, so it's something I never want to walk away from.

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

Stand-up is the foundation to my career. It's what I started out doing.

Stand-up is kind of like my home base, and doing stand-up in New York is what I like doing most.

My roots are in stand-up, and stand-up is very freeing. There's no script involved; you just fly.

Stand-up is a weird animal. There are people who really want to know what you think about things, your opinion on life. But then there are people who think you're just that beautician in 'Legally Blonde,' who doesn't have opinions on anything. Or that I'm Stifler's mom and hot for it all the time.

If I'm not in the theatre, I'm in an open mic night or doing a guest set at the Comedy Club, or whatever, just trying to develop stuff.

I have a tough time with stand-up because I am an improviser. I can riff; I can do crowd work, so I don't prepare.

Comedians who aren't screenwriters are telling jokes that they themselves think are funny. They're expressing their own view of what they think funny is.

I don't write anything. It's all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don't sit down and write.

I really enjoyed doing stand-up. Andy Kaufman was a big hero of mine. I tried to do conceptual stuff like he tried to do.

At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is like acting when the audience are the other characters that I'm acting with.

When someone says to me, do you do stand-up I say absolutely not. I like to think of it as a theatrical performance. With me the show changes maybe five to ten percent every night. Of course, whatever I see in front of me and sometimes I get on a little run about it and it changes the show. And my delivery is such that people who have seen me many times say Gee, I never heard that before. Actually, they have, but I might have changed it around.

I think stand-up comedy is this - it's this kind of indulgence and narcissism.

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.

Stand-up is my foundation. That's where it started at. And I love it because it's personal. It's mine. It's all me. It's my experience in life.

Being a correspondent on 'The Daily Show' is some combination of doing a character and doing stand-up. It's a juggling act to find a balance between being you and playing a role.

I can work as a writer, but I wanted to do stand-up.

The beautiful thing about stand-up is you can create and immediately deliver, perform, and get paid for what you do.

I really admire stand-up, and I think I would have loved to learn how to do it. I think it's terrifying and thrilling. A really cool thing to do. It's a dying art, in a way.

Some people use stand-up to get something else in their careers, but it's truly the art form of stand-up I love.

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not.