Ramy Youssef Quotes

Once I started doing stand-up, everything fell into place. That was when I started acting more; I felt like I'd found my place in the business.

Being on 'Whitney' is a job, but stand-up is my life. I could never stop. There's an art to it. I love having strangers laugh with me, so as long as I can continue doing that, I'll be happy. Working on a show and collectively sharing ideas with a cast is great, but stand-up is my first love.

Stand-up will always be my first love, and it has been the primary way I've expressed myself since I was 17.

I never predicted that I'd be a comedian, but it was something that came so naturally to me. I just felt good doing it.

I prefer being known for my stand-up because I write it. I love being an actor, and saying other people's words is great. But then, when I do stand-up, I love getting my own point of view out there.

Stand-up is my foundation. That's where it started at. And I love it because it's personal. It's mine. It's all me. It's my experience in life.

When I used to watch comedians with my dad, he laid it all out for me. He wanted to be a comedian himself, and he was so funny. We'd watch stand-up on TV, and he'd tell me the subtext of what they were saying.

I've been doing stand-up since '89.

Comedy was something I picked up trying to perfect my art through spoken word. I got on YouTube just to show off my poetry, and then people thought I was funny, so I ran with it.

I will always do stand-up, even if my acting career takes off. Stand-up is my life.

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

Stand-up is the foundation to my career. It's what I started out doing.

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.

Stand-up is kind of like my home base, and doing stand-up in New York is what I like doing most.

I always was a writer, but then I wanted to do stand-up because I thought that was a way that I could perform what I wrote.

Yeah, I do stand-up, my own type of stand-up.

I got into stand-up because I love stand-up. Specifically in stand-up, I love jokes. I love short, structured ideas and a punch line.

I'm always blown away by stand-ups. I'm blown away by people like that who are craftspeople at comedy.

A lot of people get into stand-up as a back door into acting or something. But I really like writing jokes and telling jokes.

I don't write anything. It's all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don't sit down and write.

Finding your voice as a stand up comedian means deeply knowing who you are as an artist and a human being.

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

One of the reasons I still do stand-up is because it was so hard in the beginning that I feel like it would be such a shame not to redeem it that it's all fun.

You're always on duty because you're in a constant state of observation. That's one of the challenges of being a comedian. I think one of the other challenges is that, whether we like it or not, it's a profession that requires failure. It doesn't just encourage failure. It requires it because it's all trial and error. You need to know what doesn't work to know what works.

Stand-up comedy had an interesting effect on me in terms of how I started to think about constructing things, because I really loved the interstices, the linkages, or lack thereof.