Don Rickles Quotes

Stand-up, for me, is really more of an addiction, so you have to feed the beast whenever you can.

I'm like the master of ceremonies being funny, and then sometimes people you're with, girlfriends and stuff, are like, 'God I wish I had the person on stage to be with all the time.'

To be honest, I don't know really what I do on stage.

I'm hardly a known name, but I don't want to go, like, 'Oh, people call me a storyteller comedian, let me just go up and just talk about my day.' I don't want that to happen.

I think the challenge is going out in front of a paying audience with absolutely nothing and trying to entertain them for two hours. Thankfully, I only think about that right before we go on, and then once we're out there, everything's fine.

I don't like planning what am I gonna say to the crowd. Sometimes the show takes a whole different twist.

There's an audience that is paid to laugh at my jokes. I'm playing a character while I'm doing stand-up. Real stand-ups, man, they're playing themselves. I'd be far too terrified.

I started comedy in 2006. I didn't even think it was a thing I could do.

Stand up is the most stressful, and hosting and presenting a show has its own stresses, because you've got an audience which you've got to entertain as well as an audience at home.

People often tell me that they have no idea how I can do standup. The idea of trying to make a large group of strangers laugh is, for many, absolutely petrifying - and it is - but there are ways of gradually developing the material that can ease the fear.

It's easy to be silly in real life, but making stuff up onstage, that seemed hard. Better to be the funny person off-the-cuff in the room than to risk being unfunny onstage.

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.

Stand-up is not something that you're good at right away. You have to do it a ton. But, I think I got to shave a year off because I didn't have to get over stage fright.

I think I will always be performing; I don't think I can take that away. Because I really just enjoy it. I like getting up to sing; I like the challenge of learning new material and singing it in front of an audience.

I wish I had the guts and talent to be a good comedian. I love the idea of it, yet I'm terrified of it. I'd also love to play music in front of people.

I love performing on stage the most. It's getting that instant reaction from a live audience. There are no boundaries, you can take your character as far as you want to, you can be the craziest person ever.

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.

When I'm gigging, there's an uneasy shift when I pull a puppet out. People look at me aghast and I feel I have about 20 seconds to win them over. You even get the prejudice among other people in your own profession.

I specifically remember doing the musical 'Sweet Charity' at Stagedoor. I was playing Vittorio Vidal, which is a very funny part, and some other small roles. I couldn't really sing that well, but there were so many fun bits, and I just remember the tremendous adrenaline rush I felt from being onstage and hearing the audience enjoying it.

I remember seeing McCoy Tyner in concert, and thinking that the music was incredible, but wanting to be invited in. I figured that humor was the way of letting the audience in. I've gotten a hard time about it, but I love to be funny onstage.

I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.

When you go out there to do comedy, you feel like you're doing battle with the audience a lot of the time. You're either going to get 'em, or you're not.

With acting, I always feel conscious of what I'm doing.

Just me onstage with a mike having an intimate relationship with the audience. I don't get nervous for that. I just get excited.

I never want to cannibalize my act, and I'm really excited that I am going to be able to perform new material. I'm not a huge fan of repeating jokes, and I don't really do any of my old material from old stand-up acts.