Riaad Moosa Quotes

In stand-up it really helps to play yourself and talk about your own feelings. You cannot fail to be original if you're just talking about what you think about X, Y and Z. Unless you've got a twin brother who's also a stand-up.

I always thought that the fastest way for me to get ahead and get noticed and to do well was to make my act very accessible. When I first started, I talked about family stuff, my dog, my cat. It was all I knew back then; I wasn't forcing anything, but I wasn't like, 'Hey, don't you hate doing homework?'

I've always been interested in socially political, or overtly political, comedy. And I guess I've always liked to channel some kind of personal element to that.

Definitely, there is a sense in my writing that people now know me in a personal way. And to an extent, that's true because I write about very personal things, and I use the personal often to contextualize some of these sociopolitical issues that we're dealing with. And to an extent, they're right. They know something about me.

I wanted to write stories I wanted to read, that I and my friends related to.

It's warts and all in my songs, and I think that's why people can relate to them.

So if we have anything original to offer, it's to speak from our own life about the society we're in.

I try to do women's-point-of-view comedy. The joke is, 'This is what I think; there's the truth.' I try to think of stuff that's real broad, but the more personal it is, the more universal it is. All my friends go through the same stuff.

I love to write what I see and what I do and what I experience, and I like to see if people can relate to that. I don't know if I am as good at making up a story in my head that has no truth to it, so that is a challenge for me.

When I started, I was doing all the good comedians I'd ever seen. Then I developed my own voice. My routines are my natural way of looking at the world.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

My inspiration is always what I think my fans want to listen to. I often write about social problems. If I'm not going through it or I haven't gone through it, I want to make sure it touches someone. That's what I base my music on.

For the first six months of my stand-up career, I was talking like Danny Dyer. I was doing a lot of 'alright guvnors?' It wasn't true to who I was.

When I'm rapping, like, a turn up song, I'm thinking about what the people want to hear; this is what they're going to like. When I'm singing, I'm, like, telling my story. I'm not worried if people like it; I'm just trying to be truthful, you know what I'm saying? I'm just talking about something that happened to me.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever - I rap about it.

If there's something you want to say or talk about, then that's what rap is all about - talking about your own experience.

I feel like one of my strengths is writing about stories that are unique to me but somehow relate with everyone, and the one thing I've found is that if you make a song wholly unique to you, then you don't have to compete with everybody, because nobody else can make a song like you.

If I want people to connect to my words and my stories, I need to tell them where they came from. Because then, when you break into song, they have kind of a blueprint for why I wrote that song, so they can come to it with something they went through that helps them connect to it.

The thing about comedy is it gives you a platform to expose your own shortcomings, so it becomes a public display of weirdness.

Standup is essentially part of your personality with the volume turned up.

I realized that if you're trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and really trying to write from something genuine is the way to go. Really it's mostly from my own process, my own experience.

If I had not lived the life I had lived and did not have the wife I have and the children I have, I would never know how to play that role [of Dr. Bedsloe], and I wouldn't have any of those qualities. It's a real example of how it is true that the camera catches everything. Even the stuff you're trying to hide.

With writing, I think you have to be honest with yourself. I have a certain kind of writing; that is, I like to really embellish the human spirit. You have to write about something you have a feel for.

Swing your swing. I know, I did.

Of all the questions I'm asked, the most difficult is, "How does it feel to be famous?" Since I'm not, that question always catches me with a feeling of surrealism....I've got three kids and I've changed all their diapers, and when it's two o'clock in the morning and you're changing something that's sort of special delivery with one eye open and one eye shut you don't feel famous.