Kunal Nayyar Quotes

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.

Stand up is really fun because if I think of a joke or a funny idea, then I can just go and tell some people and if they laugh, they laugh right away.

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

Actually, I think I'm funnier off-camera.

The success of any stand-up act comes out of life experience.

I'm not a natural comic, I don't think. That's why I gave up stand-up. It was hard. It involved a lot of death. Dying. Dying on stage. But it's one of those jobs you can only learn by doing it.

I need to keep my ad-libbing skills honed and make sure I'm able to banter with people and treat topics a bit more light-heartedly. But as a stand-up, first and foremost, my job is to make sure that I can write the routine that hopefully people will talk about when something big happens.

When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.

Well, I think my stand-up is often kind of visual. Not like Carrot Top visual, but visual.

I'm really good at standup. I always win at standup.

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

You can't just yell jokes at people.

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.

I tend to a lot of improvisational ranting, and that's fun. For me, stand-up has been, performance-wise, a really good outlet.

Stand-up is hard.

If you are doing stand-up comedy, you have to be confident in what you are doing. That doesn't mean just because you are confident you are funny.

It takes both courage and talent to stand up in front of fellow human beings and make them crack a smile, and at the same time keep it clean.

There is never hesitation about doing stand-up. It's just me doing my thing.

If you have the right voice and the right delivery, you're cocky enough, and you pound down on the punch line, you can say anything and make people laugh maybe three times before they realize you're not telling jokes.

The jokes are great but what really matters for a comedian is his performance, his whole attitude, and the laughs that he gets between the jokes rather than on top of the jokes.

I told jokes badly.

You say you're a comedian, you always have to be on guard.

I was always a clown. In the eighth grade I won a city speech contest by doing an Eddie Murphy routine. I'm no good at public speaking, but if I can assume a role and speak as that person, then I'm fine. When I had to give a book report, I always did it in character.

If I think something's funny, I try to mold it into a joke as soon as possible. Once I have a joke, I say it a million different ways on stage until I find a rhythm and it feels like it's as good as it can be.

Comedy's all math, figuring out the timing.