Laurie Notaro Quotes

If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.

Sometimes I start off shows by explaining to people that it's just a bunch of stories - I always say 'It's like standup, just less funny.'

I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.

I can work as a writer, but I wanted to do stand-up.

Some people use stand-up to get something else in their careers, but it's truly the art form of stand-up I love.

I still do standup.

I started doing standup when I was in college, and I would incorporate a lot of characters into my act.

When I was nine, we'd take a bus to the seaside. Coming back, we'd take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that.

I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.

Stand-up is what I am; stand-up is what made me.

It takes both courage and talent to stand up in front of fellow human beings and make them crack a smile, and at the same time keep it clean.

I always was a writer, but then I wanted to do stand-up because I thought that was a way that I could perform what I wrote.

I guess telling stories is an art. I never looked at it that way. I just started talking, and everyone started laughing. So I kept talking, and they kept laughing.

You know, stand-up comedy is where I pretty much started out.

I don't have a specific plan except for as long as people want to listen to me talk, I'm going to keep talking. I can't imagine a life without doing standup.

In high school, I didn't know what comedy was, but I was involved in speech and debate and public speaking.

I prefer to tell stories. If it's funny, then I want to do it on stage.

I just loved stand-up comics as a kid. I'd watch them on 'The Tonight Show,' and I thought what a great craft it was to come out on stage with no instrument or anything and be able to entertain people.

Stand-up was my entree into the entertainment world. I didn't have to act out somebody else's words. I could just stand there with a microphone, and nobody would interrupt me. It's the most narcissistic thing you could probably do.

I love standing at a microphone and making a room of people laugh. That's the part of the work I love; everything else is extraneous.

I love storytellers. When I was growing up, my inspirations were watching Eddie Murphy, Dennis Wolfberg, and Louie Anderson. These guys were great at telling stories, and I made that my own style, talking about things that happened to me and trying to make them funny.

I got into standup because I wanted to be an actor, and then I ended up loving standup for the next eleven years.

I love doing stand up. I think it's a really worthwhile art form. It's so unique in all the things it combines, in terms of it being philosophizing, preaching, speaking truth to power and basic communicating. It's a good way to talk back to the world.

I wasn't a class clown, I just found at an early age that I was able to make people laugh. So I mostly wrote funny stuff instead of writing what I was supposed to be writing.

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