Jessica Williams Quotes

If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned laughter is cheating.

I think you develop strong instincts when you're a comedian. You have to pay your bills by making people laugh every six seconds... or not. I had to do that for 22 years.

Being a comedian is an incredible thing, but it can be scary sometimes.

I had some friends that tried it down there, and I went to a couple of open mics, and I just kind of got this... this sick urge to try it instead of just watching it.

There's no real preparing at home for stand-up. You just go and you just do it.

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

I was a failed actor but I still wanted to show off, so I ended up doing live comedy.

I've been doing comedy longer than I haven't been doing comedy, as I was performing for three years before I even got on 'The Tonight Show.' There's truly nothing like it; it's intense and exhilarating, even though it looks so casual.

I know what I want to talk about, but I don't really know what's funny about a joke until I perform it in front of an audience.

Before I started doing standup, I knew that I had what it takes to develop an act. I went down to clubs with not many people there, and I just worked on it, man. A lot of my friends are comedians, so that part had a lot of encouragement, even though the shows were very caveman-like.

I started doing stand up when I was 19. Because I was underage at the time, at certain clubs I would be forced to wait outside until it was my time to go on stage. Then I would do my set, walk off, and be kicked out again.

I never thought I'd end up doing comedy, but actually, it's been something I've really relished the challenge of and ended up doing quite a bit of.

Not everyone can be as successful a performer as myself, who gave 10 great performances the first time I ever did comedy, and then toiled in obscurity for years.

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.

My job is mostly to entertain and be funny.

I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist.

You can't be a proper comic unless you've been out on stage and felt the fear.

Little did I know that earning a living at stand-up is the hardest thing you can do. But once I started doing it, I just loved it, and I realized that I was actually kinda good at it, and then that was it.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

In Manhattan, I often do two or three or more shows a night, so I'm always working on new material.

I was always worried with comedy - what if I came to work and I wasn't in a funny mood? That hasn't been an issue.

It seems like when I first started, people got into comedy because they wanted to be good comedians.

The only way to get better at stand-up is to do loads of gigs, and I don't know. I spread myself pretty thin to get the stage time. I'd love to do more, really.

Maybe it's because I come from a very utopian world of being a comedian, but I'm used to many live comedy performances going on in any city I'm in, and each of us is trying to be the best at what we do. I don't think of it as a competition so much as a thriving comedy economy.

If you want to be a comedian, go out. Do a week in Des Moines, Iowa. Try to make those people laugh.