Sammy Davis Jr. Quotes

You say a line and you wait for them to laugh, then you say another line and you wait... It felt weird to me. But it's interesting and the energy is almost like theatre, I suppose, with all the people there.

I know what I want to talk about, but I don't really know what's funny about a joke until I perform it in front of an audience.

People often tell me that they have no idea how I can do standup. The idea of trying to make a large group of strangers laugh is, for many, absolutely petrifying - and it is - but there are ways of gradually developing the material that can ease the fear.

Doing stand-up is not normal. People fear public speaking above all other things, and I am no different.

The very first time I did stand-up, that was terrifying.

I remember thinking as I was doing the jokes for the first time, "If I can hear that very clearly, I'm not hearing laughter." It just became deafening, this buzzing noise. I mean, it was brutal. It was really terrible. Then I remember thinking, "At least nobody important, or anyone who I really respect, saw that." And then literally right when I went off the stage, Jerry Seinfeld got up and went on. So I was like, "Oh great. Seinfeld saw me bomb." On the other hand, I thought, "At least no one will be thinking of me anymore. They'll just be focusing on him."

Having to stand in front of an audience and have it be your job to make them laugh, you can't really look to anyone but yourself. It's what you wrote, what you said and how you said it, so it's kind of terrifying, but I liked it. When it goes well, it's the best feeling in the world. When it doesn't go well, it's the worst feeling, but once you get into the rhythm of it, I think it's really fun.

My first open mic, I drank a full pitcher of beer by myself. I wasn't afraid of being in front of people as much as, Is this funny?

When you're going for a joke, you're stuck out there if it doesn't work. There's nowhere to go. You've done the drum role and the cymbal clash and you're out on the end of the plank.

When you're a stand-up, you play in front of 600 people, and it's all about timing. I could never do stand-up comedy; it would be way too hard for me.

You can't be a proper comic unless you've been out on stage and felt the fear.

I failed to get into drama school, and my best friend told me I should do stand-up instead. I was always doing gags and voices, so he booked a gig for me without telling me. I only had four days to write it. I did a seven-minute set; the first four minutes were terrible, but the last two were amazing.

I had some friends that tried it down there, and I went to a couple of open mics, and I just kind of got this... this sick urge to try it instead of just watching it.

I've never been able to write for stand-up.

Some comics have long routines to get them in the mood - I just prefer to sit down, write out the same jokes in a different order and then have a little prayer that I won't be met by silence.

Like every comedian, if I heard a joke that I thought would work, I used it.

To be thrown onto the stand-up stage is an experience that you cannot fathom until you're actually there, because there's no place to go, and everyone is looking at you and you can't even see them because of the lights. And yet you have to manage to start talking and be funny on top of it.

There's certain stock lines that, you know, like heckler lines, you know, like, where did you learn to whisper, a helicopter, you know? Nobody owns those. I mean, someone first wrote it but it's been so universally used that it's common and it's called stock.

The hardest part of comedy is writing the jokes, and the second-hardest part is telling the jokes. To me, everything else is significantly easier.

The first joke I ever told on stage was a golf joke.

Just to talk in front of people is scary. And now you gotta learn how to be funny, and now you gotta learn how to make people laugh at what you think is funny. That's not easy.

Although I do stand-up - doing actual stage work is terrifying for me.

It's hard to get laughs when you're new.

At some point I stopped stand-up because I didn't have something to say on a nightly basis.

On Friday night, it was fun [to know] that if you bombed, or whatever was going on, that you'd be on TV at 11. It was a cool feeling, and you'd get a couple hundred dollars.