Wyatt Cenac Quotes

I know what is funny coming out of my mouth and what is not funny coming out of my mouth. You have to figure out, What is the joke that I can do that nobody else can do?

I loved Omar Vizquel. He tells some really long jokes, and he has his own way of telling them, but he can make every joke very funny. He would always come up with jokes on the loudspeaker on the bus.

You can't just yell jokes at people.

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.

Comedy is very controlling - you are making people laugh.

There's only one rule in stand-up, which is that you have to be funny. Yet 99 per cent of comics look and talk exactly the same.

I don't do one-liners, because you don't learn anything about that comedian.

I'm dirty, I'm irreverent - but I'm still a very topical comedian.

Comedians who aren't screenwriters are telling jokes that they themselves think are funny. They're expressing their own view of what they think funny is.

One joke coming from one person can land completely flat, while somebody else delivering it in a unique way can really elevate it.

When comics are in the room, people have a tendency to try to make them laugh. That doesn't really make you funnier. It makes you a comic's comic, but you aren't going to get a fan base doing that.

I used to do much shorter jokes a lot more.

I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

So many of these comics are just frustrated singers or actors - they want to get a gig doing a sitcom. It's paint-by-the-numbers comedy, lame joke-telling. They're drawn to it as a career move.

There's a fraudulent root element of comedy in that we say things night after night as though they are rolling effortlessly from the brain and off the tongue, when in fact they are crafted over weeks and months and years.

I think a theater show is a pure version of me doing my material. The theater crowd is a bit more polite, there really aren't hecklers, and there are a lot of people there to see me, and they're excited about the jokes and hanging out with me for a show.

When you're doing stand-up, you can comment if something fails, get a laugh from that.

Richard Lewis is the master at taking a joke that he's told a million times in a row in the past year, on the road, and making it look like he's pulling it out of thin air.

Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.

When you're doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.

I was the kid who always hung back and then dropped the jokes when you least expected it. Timing was everything. My mouth sort of developed over time.

So much of a stand-up's life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.

You can't teach someone to be funny, but you can teach comic timing. If you listen to a good comic, you can learn how to put it on a page.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.