Conan O'Brien Quotes

I used to do a lot of comedy. I don't know what happened. I think it's my face.

I always want to go back and do stand-up; I like the freedom.

Some people use stand-up to get something else in their careers, but it's truly the art form of stand-up I love.

As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.

Did you know I started out as a stand-up comic? People don't believe me when I tell them. That's how I saw myself, in comedy.

Doing stand-up takes the fun out of being funny.

I left home to become a singer and didn't realise when I turned comedian.

People who want to do stand-up from the start - I mean that's an extremely self-centred thing to want, isn't it?

I think I probably would have gone into stand-up.

I started comedy in 2006. I didn't even think it was a thing I could do.

I started pursuing stand-up comedy in 12th grade.

I like stand-up. I've done it since I was a teenager, so it's kind of my first job and first kind of creative way to express myself.

Before stand-up, I'm not sure I even had a point of view.

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

Stand-up is not something that you're good at right away. You have to do it a ton. But, I think I got to shave a year off because I didn't have to get over stage fright.

Around year seven or eight, you'd kill yourself when you realized Norm had to enter and you had to come up with a new beer joke.

I really didn't think anything would come out of doing stand-up.

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

[sam] Kinison, when he started out, he'd come to Canada when I was first starting, and he'd always [bomb].

People always talk about the content, in terms of the politics of it or whatever social issues are in it, and it's like, "Yeah, but I'm also a good comic." You could at least talk about the form of it, and I feel like that's always the thing that's missed.

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 love doing radio, and I love doing stand-up, obviously. I'm good flying up to four hours, but anything past that, I want to kill myself.

I make people laugh hard; I'm a comic, that's just the way it is. And I make them laugh because I'm funny, not because I'm filthy. The subject matter is dirty, but the pictures I paint are really funny. A lot of comics don't understand that that's what it's about. It's just, "I'll be dirty and they'll laugh." Nobody's becoming a superstar that way.

I asked the head musician if I could go onstage during the next break and he said sure. I got two laughs in twenty minutes, and walked out feeling more elated than I had ever felt in my entire life. The glory of that triumph contented me for two full years.

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.