Jay Mohr Quotes

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.

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 love writing stand-up so much and tinkering and looking for ideas.

You say a line and you wait for them to laugh, then you say another line and you wait... It felt weird to me. But it's interesting and the energy is almost like theatre, I suppose, with all the people there.

I just realized at a certain point that no matter how much writing I did, I'm still a gym rat for comedy clubs.

Before doing stand-up, I thought acting was easy - it's not easy. It's a hard life. It's easy in its own way, you just stand there and talk. But there is a difference between people who can do it well and people who can't.

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

In my Comedy Club sets, I just work on what is fresh and try to build that show as long as I can. I don't like to do burnt material on stage. Even though my crowd loves to hear me do old stuff, I don't like to do old stuff.

To this day, to this very day, except for television, I've never had a writer. Anything I've ever done on the stage, happened on the stage and I developed it from there. It started doing impressions and jokes - which I did very poorly. To this day I can't tell a joke. That sounds nuts, but it's true. I exaggerate it and it becomes a joke. Everything I've ever done I've done out on the stage and it became a performance over many many years.

I've always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.

There are a lot of great jokes you can sit down and write, but that's just a written joke, versus the comedy of the situation. Ideally, you're pulling as much comedy out of the situation as you can.

I don't write my standup on paper or anything; but I just organically do it on stage, have an idea, chat it up a little bit. I'm keeping notes. I'm trying to keep up with this world and try to bring out a special every year.

It's good to do stand-up. It kind of wakes you up and makes you feel like you're doing something. You got the crowd right there. That's all fun.

When I do any stand-up, you're the writer, director, and producer. You're alone.

[Stand-up] might be ballsy, but I'd rather not be an actor. Actors are tools.

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

I'm a comedian, and I like to work on my live show, and if I'm doing television, I don't have time to work on my live show, and I can become a lame comic, and that sucks.

When young comedians ask me for advice that's the one thing I always say is if they're improvisers I'm like do improv, don't make that your sole thing. And at the end of the day when you do your best work you also just kinda, by definition flush it down the toilet and never do it again.

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not. So it's hard for me to come up with things, because I don't write stuff, I don't write my act down.

'Where's Bill going?' He's going to comedy death. Boom! He pops out of it with another joke. It's my particular style.

I've done stand-up since I was 18 years old, and I absolutely love it, but I used to go onstage, and the audience was my peers. Now I go onstage, and I could be their mother.

I don't really write jokes down. I tend to have a premise that I work out and test on stage.

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

I've been doing stand-up since '89.