Aisha Tyler Quotes

If I can make a teacher's salary doing comedy, I think that's better than being a teacher.

To get a job where the only thing you have to do in your career is to make people laugh-well, it's the best job in the world.

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 started standup at age nineteen. I decided that the only way I was going to try show business as a career was if I could make total strangers laugh.

I've always been funny, but I never considered it as a particular career path until my early 30s, when I realized that hip-hop wasn't going to be the long term.

I think people have a misconception about comedians and performers. All that stuff is serious business.

I am a product... I'm a comedian. I'm not curing cancer. In the end, I tell jokes. I make people laugh.

Ever since I was 2 or 3, I loved to perform for people. I would walk up to another table in a restaurant and crack a joke, sing a song, do a dance, or something entertaining, and the 'audience' would almost always smile and laugh.

From the first time I saw Sid Caesar be funny I knew that's what I had to do.

I can tell you this: Stand-up is not glamorous.

Being a rapper is about being cool, but being a comedian, you're not supposed to be the coolest guy.

I've always had a sense of humour, and I still do, so I just want to go on performing as long as I can. It's as simple as that.

I was born. When I was 23 I started telling jokes. Then I started going on television and doing films. That's still what I am doing. The end.

There are so many really good comedians, and I would never be as good as they are. It's not my calling.

Stand-up. It's the only place I'm comfortable.

The excitement does not change. After 40 years in the business, I still find the show to be a magical moment - the performance anxiety, the litmus test.

I made my living as an actor, and I love acting, so I'm an actor. But that gets you in a lot of trouble in the art world.

I think you have a duty and a responsibility to entertain. We have to always remember that there's a public to be entertained.

Sometimes when you're stood in front of 100 people, delivering a speech with rage and lots of emotion, that can be utterly terrifying. I find that very scary.

People thought I was funny, so I kind of took entertaining for granted... it was inevitable that I'd start giving little performances.

I had no desire to get up onstage and tell jokes. I prefer to stand next to really funny people.

I was so terrified before an audience that I would break out in these ugly red hives, and my lips would quiver at the sight of a word or a song.

I worked as a comedian for 23 years, 51 weeks a year.

There are many problems with being a comedian: the travel, the late nights, the pressure, the fear of running out of funny things to say.

I just like to build. Don't get me wrong: I think stand-up is great, and when someone like Richard Pryor or Steve Martin does stand-up, there's nothing better in the world. But I don't want to watch a lot of stand-ups for two hours. So I can do 45 minutes of stand-up and then say, 'Can we do something else now?'