Frankie Boyle Quotes

Bad improv happens with people who are inexperienced with each other and don't know the craft that well. But bad stand-up is something that could happen to someone at any level in their career.

When you put comedy in the room it's supposed to be in, you start learning it's a process. Not everything is a home run. You have singles, and you ground a few out. But ultimately, it's the journey you have with that comedian, whether it's ten minutes or an hour.

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.

When I began doing stand-up, it took me a long time to get an hour's worth of material together.

I always try to improve my stand-up game, it's very important for me.

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

I could never do stand-up because it's that thing of having to get up on stage. And out of every 10 jokes you tell, nine of them have to get a really good response.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well.

My stand-up is quite good now, people say. It's just like a big conversation each time. Every gig is a rehearsal.

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.

At this point, I feel fairly comfortable in terms of performance. I think having a sketch background actually helps a lot. Because my background is acting, and stand-up, in a lot of ways, is acting.

The only way to get better at stand-up is to do loads of gigs, and I don't know. I spread myself pretty thin to get the stage time. I'd love to do more, really.

There's no real preparing at home for stand-up. You just go and you just do it.

You won't see me at a microphone singing and tapping my foot. I spend a lot of money on sets, costumes and sound. I believe people deserve a show. I'm a singer, musician, dancer. I work hard, and I'm soaking wet when I come off.

Stand up comedy is this thing you get to do, so you have to treat it with respect. You can't just be like, 'Alright, I got my hour down, people are coming to see me now. Now, I'm going to lean on the mike stand.' No, you gotta work even harder now. You got to top what you already did. Because they'll find someone else.

Everyone forgets comedians are actors. There's no question about it. A Robin Williams cannot say the same line every night for 40 weeks and make it sound fresh unless he's doing an acting job.

It takes many years to be a great comedian.

The only way to stay sharp is to do live shows. There is no part-time comedy.

If I'm in a town for very long, usually I'll work out in the comedy club just to keep my chops or work out the beats on new 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.

The more you work in this business as a comedian, the closer you get to just being yourself onstage, on camera, the more well received you are.

It took me a good eight to ten years to really formulate what I was doing onstage and start to get really personal with comedy. I always really had timing naturally, it was just about trying to figure out how that timing was going to work onstage.

Comedy clubs sharpen a comic, they're like the gym for us, making us stronger, faster, funnier. Without them every comedy show would feel like a monologue.

Open mics are a great way to rework your material to see what punchlines land best.