Lewis Black Quotes

I started comedy in 2006. I didn't even think it was a thing I could do.

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

For my first gig, I got $75. I could make money being funny, so I pursued it as a career and have turned it into a lucrative business.

I wasn't properly performing in Canada. I was just starting out, and when everyone starts out, they're terrible. I'm sure there are some Kellyanne Conway videos of me just really dying on a stage.

I don't want a chat show or to be on telly every day, as that's not my business; my business is standing in front of people and making them laugh, and I want to see how far I can get with that.

Presenting the Oscars was the most nerve-racking job I have ever done in show business. It's very much a live show: they have comedy writers waiting in the wings, and as you come off between presentations, they hand you an appropriate gag to tell.

I haven't really done a lot of comedy. It's something that terrifies me.

I never wanted to be road comic.

Comedy is an amazing calling. Once you get that first laugh, it's hard to turn away. Then, of course, you're hooked and you have to learn how to survive in the business.

In high school, I was too shy to perform. It's one thing to get laughs from your family, to be funny at parties and in class. It's another thing to get up on the stage.

You learn timing on the road. You learn structure and how to read an audience. You learn so much about the business of laughter that you can't learn on a set, because it's all on you. Sometimes you bomb, and you know not to tell that joke again... You just hope people find the humor in the awkwardness.

I much prefer doing comedy. I get a little paranoid when the audience is not laughing.

I don't really do stand-up.

The minute I started doing comedy, the doors opened.

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

Getting up in front of the toughest crowds, you know, playing pubs in South Armagh - where people didn't necessarily even know what stand-up comedy was - you had to force yourself to do it. It went against every instinct in your body, but you did it anyway.

I never went on auditions because I would be terrible at it, so I just did stand-up.

I started standup at age nineteen. I decided that the only way I was going to try show business as a career was if I could make total strangers laugh.

I've been trying to bust into the comedy business my whole life. It's hard in Hollywood to do different things. I know this. It's a struggle.

I love to work. I love doing standup.

I was in a play in elementary school and had to jump up and run away. I was nervous and tripped and fell down and everyone laughed. Their laughter made me relax, so I pretended it was part of the show.

One place that I really feel comfortable is being a comedienne. I'm very socially inept. There's so many things that I can not do in life, and this is, like, the one thing that I have mastery over. It's my world. And anybody who's coming to the show, it's like they're coming because they know that this is my world.

Maybe I just wasn't a show-biz type. I didn't miss performing at all.

I'd never experienced stress before I did stand-up, and it was a massive shock to my system, this thing of waking up, and the nerves of, 'You're on stage tonight.'

I don't need somebody behind a desk to tell me what a marketing survey says is funny. I got 3 million miles and 70,000 tickets sold, telling me that I know how to make people laugh.