Varun Tej Quotes

Doing comedy is very challenging, as I am a shy person in real life.

The hardest part of comedy is writing the jokes, and the second-hardest part is telling the jokes. To me, everything else is significantly easier.

Stand-up, I find it really difficult. It's not really my thing.

Comedy is like math - you can check your answer because you know you've gotten it right if you get a laugh. It just makes sense to me. I feel like because I've had to keep that tool in my box for so long, I'm ready to show it off a bit.

Here's the thing, with comedy - and I learned this from Will Ferrell - you can't be ashamed. If you're doing comedy, you have to fully commit to the joke. Shame is not part of it. If you act shy or uncomfortable about your body, that makes the audience shy and uncomfortable. And in a comedy you just want them to loosen up and laugh.

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 was the kid who always hung back and then dropped the jokes when you least expected it. Timing was everything. My mouth sort of developed over time.

I really like doing television shows, and I anticipated doing a comedy, because that's the place I feel the most comfortable - those are the risks I want to take.

Nothing makes an actor feel freer and more inventive and more creative than being trusted.

The best part about stand-up is that you control everything. Period.

I've always been terrible on regular sitcoms with lots of jokes. I don't know how to tell jokes.

Impressions are still kind of hard for me and not what I love to do the most, but with characters, I think there's an element of fearlessness. You try to figure out the best reading and wording of the jokes before the show, and then you just really have to go hard.

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.

Just to talk in front of people is scary. And now you gotta learn how to be funny, and now you gotta learn how to make people laugh at what you think is funny. That's not easy.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Stand-up is my favorite thing I've ever done. There's so much independence.

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.

The first night you walk down to a comedy club, at least for me, I had my voice, and then I went on stage and I lost it.

The beautiful thing about stand-up is you can create and immediately deliver, perform, and get paid for what you do.

Going out on a stage publicly and not knowing how people are going to react to you - once I experienced that, it made me feel much more comfortable about going into a scene.

When I was younger, I was nervous and didn't have a huge amount of confidence as an actor. Comedy is something - you know when you're getting it right because you can hear. And you can hear if you're not getting it right! I like to create interesting, weird characters, and they're often best in comedies.

I feel I've always got to keep my stand-up because I never want to lose it.

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.

I've never been an impressionist. I was doing Sofia Vergara and Elizabeth Dole. I'm sometimes so low-confidence and self-aware, so characters that are confident and ignorant and wrong are my favorite.

I certainly love doing comedy and feel most comfortable near it.