Neal Brennan Quotes

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.

After I got my first laugh on stage, I was hooked.

This is my chance to get out there and appease the fans of my music as well as show people that I do do standup comedy because a lot of people don't know that's where I started.

I have no idea what my best material is. Different people like different things. I'll say this: The political stuff gets the press, but the relationship jokes sell all the seats.

It takes many years to be a great comedian.

I left school and couldn't find acting work, so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up. I've always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.

I'm definitely guilty of thinking something is funny but thinking the audience won't. Then three years later I will finally try it and it'll kill them. I got to give them more credit.

Every now and then, when I think about it, I think, 'What would I even talk about onstage?' It's never been, 'I wonder if I'm funny. I wonder if I can come up with jokes.' It's more, 'What would it be like without the leather suit and the anger?'

I have performed my one-man show '700 Sundays' over 400 times now. There were only two times that I can honestly say I was nervous. The first was when I knew Mel Brooks was in the audience, and the second was when Sid Caesar came.

If you do live shows long enough as a comedian, you can still hear that rhythm of laughing. It's ingrained in you, and it's not something you can really teach somebody. It comes from doing hours and hours and hours and years and decades on stage, performing in front of live crowds.

I'm just getting my sea legs. The first time you make them laugh, you're like, 'Oh my God - that just happened.' Then you're like, 'I made them laugh. I've earned this.'

Melissa and I both say we don't write very good jokes.

That's a big important deal, the way people see you from the stage. Once in a while, I'd ask people, 'How did you enjoy the show?' 'Hey, you looked great.' But how did I sound? That visual look is very important to people.

I know that, as a comedian, I've made great strides because I've worked as hard as a person can work at being at least wildly amusing.

I wouldn't say I have comedy chops. I guess you get lucky with good writing because I don't think I'm a comedian by any stretch of the imagination.

The minute I started doing comedy, the doors opened.

I couldn't deliver a joke if you asked me to. It would have to be live and spontaneous. And that's what I was able to have in New York, at 9 o'clock in the morning, and people all over the country seemed to respond to it.

Stand-up was my entree into the entertainment world. I didn't have to act out somebody else's words. I could just stand there with a microphone, and nobody would interrupt me. It's the most narcissistic thing you could probably do.

I think I probably would have gone into stand-up.

I'll be doing stand-up for the rest of my life. The opportunities that it grants you can't be denied. Stand-up is both the hardest thing I do and the thing I enjoy most.

I feel the life expectancy of a comedian is 30 seconds. If you don't hook an audience in half-a-minute, you're dead.

Being able to write jokes is great, but you still have to get used to performing them and being on stage - and enjoying being on stage, not just like tolerating it.

From the age of 14, I remember thinking I wanted to be a comedian. But that was like saying I wanted to be an astronaut. It felt like a million miles away, something I could never do, but would be great to.

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 stand-up you can just be yourself on stage. And ideally, you can't see the crowd most of the time - it's just lights in your face. But I still have had terrible stage fright.