Karen Elson Quotes

Cabaret is a great format. All you have to do is sing and be funny sporadically.

I'm really excited to share cabaret, the art form, not just with the generations that are above me, but also my generation and the generation under me. I think it's an art form that's incredibly important, and I think that my generation is a little unfamiliar with it.

If you do a musical, it's really thrilling and it's a lot of work, but it's very rewarding. I would say, for me, what I like best is what I do, which is, I call it vaudeville, I call it live, I call it in concert, I call it what Bette Midler does, and what Garland did for years, and Ethel Merman.

I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.

I love doing stuff with Todd Barry and Jon Benjamin. We give the stage to good bands and funny people.

Doing my Broadway show '700 Sundays' reminded me how much I love working in front of an audience.

I've always been a cabaret-vaudeville artist - an hourlong cabaret and a floor show in a hotel - somebody like that. That's my main forte.

The wonderful thing about cabaret is, you can do a lot of things you can't do in a concert. You can't do smoky ballads for 50 minutes in a concert. It's a different animal.

I've always wanted to do a cabaret.

I used to do cabaret as a kid and always wanted to pick it up again.

You went to your first Broadway play or musical at some point, right? Come to opera.

If you look at vaudeville in theaters vamping between acts, it was always jokes written and banter in the moment.

In the early days of the Libertines, we used to put on Arcadian cabaret nights. There'd be some girl climbing out of an egg; we'd try and get a couple of mates to tell a few jokes, performance poets, and then we'd play in the middle of it all. More people were on stage than in the crowd.

Every show with my Jazzmaster is like a new show.

We went to see all the shows. American musical theater and jazz were very big.

It never became an act in the sense of an act. It was always, no matter where we worked, little revues.

I did some acting in high school, I knew I really liked it.

Singing and acting on a show is like theater; it doesn't get any better.

I aim to please. I'm nothing if not a vaudevillian.

Stand-up is my heart and now I get a chance to do that and the music altogether. That's going to be great. I'm trying to be the Sammy Davis Jr. of 2005. I'm planning on going out with Cedric the Entertainer because he's got that musical bone, too.

My favorite is doing the television show, as a variety show, every week. If the show wasn't that great one week, we could always come back and apologize, you know?

You come to my comedy show to be entertained.

I like the idea of being out there regularly with an audience and with a funny gang of people. That's what I grew up with - doing television, doing shows every week.

Me personally, I want to entertain people above all. When you look back at burlesque in history and the real golden age of burlesque, those entertainers were there to entertain, and there wasn't usually some big political message behind what they were doing.

Frank Sinatra taught me how to do him. It took me seven years to master him. He would tell me, tap your foot, Rich, and don't forget to grasp your sleeve.