Ryan Stiles Quotes

People get recruited from sketch groups and put on 'Mad TV' and 'SNL,' but those aren't ensembles, they're all-star teams.

Craig Nelson who is an actor and is in a show called Coach in the United States. We began to do some improvisational stuff and we used to get laughs and things.

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

I do an improv show on Sunday where we have a class, and then afterwards we go and do a live performance in front of an audience.

If you're in scenes with a guy you know really well in a comedy, you tend to crack each other up too much.

There's different kinds of improv. There's Second City improv where you try to slowly build a nice sketch. There's stuff you do in college coffee houses where you just go joke, joke, joke. Bring another funny character with a funny hat on his head. Christopher Guest is more the line of trying to get a story out.

When you see the American chat shows, they've got so many ideas about what they could with the guests. I did stand-up on 'Jimmy Fallon' and they had loads of sketches and ideas, we don't tend to do that here.

Because I started my career in improv, performing with Second City and the Ace Trucking Company, I always enjoy being in situations where - as an actor - you have to think fast & be light on your feet.

My first improv was Second City in Chicago. Before that, I worked at - with a partner, doing comedy sketches.

If I'm not in the theatre, I'm in an open mic night or doing a guest set at the Comedy Club, or whatever, just trying to develop stuff.

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.

When we did 'Boomerang,' which is one of my favorite scenes, the whole dinner scene was ad-libbed.

I've had some shows where I really plan out what I'm going to say. Then I've had other shows where I'm like, 'Take a sip of the Ole Smoky Moonshine and just let it be natural and cross your fingers that you say the right things.'

On 'Sunny,' the main actors are adults, and we're all friends, and we all have the same sense of humor, so there's a lot of improvising.

One thing that I struggled with was not corpsing when you're being thrown stuff that's absolutely hilarious by the other actors.

I've been doing stand-up since I was 19. There have been times I've had to step away because of my schedule, but now I'm able to go out and do theaters and not smoky little bars.

I'm not very good when I'm given scripts.

The thing that's frustrating about improv is that even if you have the best show in the world, it's over when it's over. You get to build stand-up - I really like that aspect of it. I like writing jokes, and you don't get to do that in improv.

Work wise, as a stunt woman, I enjoy telly - or TV - because - and, as an actor - I kind of enjoy the urgency of it. I enjoy the problem-solving that's happening. Right now, we don't have time to rehearse for hours. And, if something goes wrong, we don't have time to shoot something else for four days until we sort it out.

As a kid I would watch 'SCTV,' 'Saturday Night Live,' 'Monty Python' and 'The Kids in the Hall,' and be amazed that these guys got to be different people every week. It spoke to the acting side in me.

A mimicry artiste should be spontaneous and he should be able to crack jokes on the spot.

A lot of times when you're trying to do improv, everybody's doing a different style.

I don't want to do procedural: I want to do longform.

I don't think it's necessary to do stand-up to be a presenter, but I like it, because it keeps me sharp, especially when something like 'Take Me Out' is 80% is ad-libbed, so that works for me.

I have this habit of not rehearsing a lot; I don't go on practicing my dialogues, pauses, and actions.