Bob Newhart Quotes

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'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.

When you're doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

It is a great rush to come up with a joke that gets a good response from the audience. It's gold!

A lot of people think that comedy is sort of a cop out to not wrestling seriously, but I actually would argue that comedy is much more difficult than wrestling seriously because you have to be creative in almost everything that you do if you want the comedy to make sense within the realms of pro wrestling.

I need to keep my ad-libbing skills honed and make sure I'm able to banter with people and treat topics a bit more light-heartedly. But as a stand-up, first and foremost, my job is to make sure that I can write the routine that hopefully people will talk about when something big happens.

The moment for me, thinking I might actually want to do comedy professionally, was when I did public speaking at school. I found out I was good at getting up in front of class. In the fifth grade, I did a speech on comedy.

I've been performing stand-up comedy for ten years, it's what I love and will always do.

Stand-up comedy is not a man's job. It's an alpha job: To be the only person in a room with a microphone who's allowed to talk.

I've done comedy on stage, in fact it is one of my strong points.

Some actors try to play parts and do things they can't do. Being funny is one of them. Being funny's hard.

Billy Crystal knows how to make people laugh. He's got 30 years on stage... there's no telling him what's funny.

I really admire stand-up, and I think I would have loved to learn how to do it. I think it's terrifying and thrilling. A really cool thing to do. It's a dying art, in a way.

I never used to tell jokes on stage. Now I'm cutting up jokes all night long.

I had a flair for comedy and could give a sustained performance.

When you're doing stand-up, you can comment if something fails, get a laugh from that.

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.

I think to be a successful comic, you have to be exceptionally smart and exceptionally perceptive.

You can't make people laugh for more than half an hour and be consistent.

I'm not an artist. I tell inappropriate stories and jokes and I try to make people laugh.

You can't do anything to be funny. That's cringeworthy. If your humor comes out of a place of love every time, you don't make the joke bigger than you. The funniest comedians are in touch with their emotional level.

I really loved what I was doing being creative and being funny as a stand-up comedian.

Patrice O'Neal is the best comic I ever saw.

Comedy is incredibly hard. You have to be loose. You have to be not afraid to fail.