Hari Kondabolu Quotes

It didn't have to be a newfound respect for the craft, I knew that it's notoriously difficult and frightens a lot of people off. I don't think anyone knows quite who to attribute it to, but the dying actor who says: "dying is easy, comedy is hard." I hear it.

Comedy's easy for me now - it's all about timing and the way you deliver lines. I use facial expressions to get the point across.

Performing comedy, you develop a rhythm of ideas and laughs. I live for it.

One of the funniest lines in my show was written for me by Alan Bursky. I really want to learn this routine!

A lot of people think that comedic acting is a lot harder than dramatic acting, but for me it just feels natural. It's extremely calculated, you have to be aware of every beat, but I love it. I hope to have a long lasting career in comedy.

Comic timing is something you are either born with or do not have.

Stand-up keeps you alive. It is definitely the most specialized field in comedy because you need to stay sharp and well-tuned every night.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

I think the biggest influence on my stand-up would be Chris Rock, in that I love that Chris is basically an essayist, in that he'll take a subject and just try and attack it from as many different angles as he can.

I think I am someone who is very interested in structure and different ways of delivering jokes.

I'd been writing sketches since high school, but 'Friends of the People' really taught me about structure - how to wait out a joke, how to stick with it for a while. It also made me more confident onstage as a performer.

Stand-up comedy is something that you have to strive to do, multiple times a night, every night, to be good.

There's a lot of nuances to stand-up that you definitely see when you watch someone like Chris Rock in that his body position is also part of why the joke works.

At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is like acting when the audience are the other characters that I'm acting with.

In the entertainment industry all that anybody wants to do whether it's music or stories or dancing or comedy or whatever, they want to entertain the public. And they do it any way they can. Sometimes they concentrate simply on entertaining people and they don't care what message they are giving.

A comic says funny things. A comedian says things funny.

Being a fan of comedy, it's so unique, in their own voice. I was really stoked to be able to participate. They're so great at just coming up with stuff on the fly and making stuff funny.

I performed stand-up because I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. My set was never joke-centric. It was a performance.

I believe myself to be a worthwhile and inventive performer in my own right. But I'm not in a league with Lenny [Bruce], certainly not in terms of social commentary.

Before doing stand-up, I thought acting was easy - it's not easy. It's a hard life. It's easy in its own way, you just stand there and talk. But there is a difference between people who can do it well and people who can't.

Anybody can go onstage and be dirty. You have to be funny, that's the key. You can say anything as long as it's funny. You can't take it too seriously up there. And people coming to see you can't take it too seriously.

I call it 'new forms'. When you're starting out, they ask you to do four or five minute sets, but once you're a headliner, you do like 90 minutes. I try to think of different things to divvy up the show, like doing drawings, playing music... I gotta carry the show, that's the problem.

I always loved comedy, but I never knew it was something you could learn to do. I always thought that some people are born comedians ... just like some people are born dentists.

I love those people who do story-telling and who ramble on, but I don't do that, I tell jokes - the sort of jokes that anyone really could tell in the pub.

Today's work, I don't know it just doesn't make sense, a lot of it. It's just guns and sex and more guns and more sex. You say to yourself, when the hell are you gonna get down to the nitty-gritty and do something good so people can be entertained? I mean if they call this entertainment.