Hannibal Buress Quotes

As a comedian, you have to start the show strong and you have to end the show strong. Those are the two key elements. You can't be like pancakes. You're all happy at first, but then by the end, you're sick of 'em.

Jesse has opened for me extensively on the road so I’ve seen him do hundreds of sets. He is always super funny, has tons of material and the crowds love him. Bottom line, Jesse Joyce is a great comedian.

It's good to do stand-up. It kind of wakes you up and makes you feel like you're doing something. You got the crowd right there. That's all fun.

For me, stand-up comedy is a conversation between me and the audience. I have to keep them listening. When I'm making jokes about cake for twenty minutes, I have to make sure my audience is interested and following where I'm going.

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.

Too many comics today ramble. By the time they get to the punch line, the audience has either gone to sleep, gone to the bathroom or gone to bed.

In 27 years doing this, I've seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo.

In my Comedy Club sets, I just work on what is fresh and try to build that show as long as I can. I don't like to do burnt material on stage. Even though my crowd loves to hear me do old stuff, I don't like to do old stuff.

As a live stand-up comedy performer, I have the benefit of choosing real entrance music.

When someone says to me, do you do stand-up I say absolutely not. I like to think of it as a theatrical performance. With me the show changes maybe five to ten percent every night. Of course, whatever I see in front of me and sometimes I get on a little run about it and it changes the show. And my delivery is such that people who have seen me many times say Gee, I never heard that before. Actually, they have, but I might have changed it around.

As a guy comedian, your special is probably the closest thing to the excitement of a wedding day. It's your first one, and you want it to be perfect, and you want it to mean something. You want it to look good.

You gotta have the balls to go out there and be funny, man.

If you're doing stand-up, there is no fourth wall; you're engaging an audience.

I think, as a comedian, the funniest you can be is with people you know, and [whom] you've known for years, in a pub. That's as funny as you get, and so the aim [while stand-up] is to get that funny on stage with 5,000 strangers, to get that funny in a room where people shouldn't be listening but they are.

I think anybody in front of a crowd is a comedian.

I’ll always be doing stand-up as long as people are still interested in seeing me.

I'm very lucky in that I've gotten to do a lot of things. But if you ever put a gun to my head and said, "You can only do one," I'd think it would be stand-up. I think it's the coolest job in the world.

I don't think I've ever died on stage. I've had jokes that died on stage. I've told a joke and absolutely nothing. They didn't know it was the end of the joke.

Stand-up is just me trying to be as funny as possible in the most concentrated hour with me standing on stage with no storyline, no plot line, and no character development.

I've got too much respect for stand-ups to call myself one.

I feel like every time I go out, I want to do a good job. I want people to say that he's just as good at stand-up as he is in some of the movies I've seen him in, so I try to do the best every time I go out there.

When I come out to do my stand-up set, I pretty much get bombarded with lines from movies. You try to play off it a little bit, but that's what people want to see.

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

Being a stand-up comic, this isn't a stepping-stone for me; it's what I do, and this is what I'm always going to do. And even if I do a TV show, the only reasons to do a TV show is to get more people to know me to come out to my stand-up shows.

With stand-up, it doesn't matter who you are. If the audience claps because they love your movies, that clapping stops after five seconds, and then it's your job to make them laugh.