Ronnie Barker Quotes

To have a job making people laugh really is the greatest thing.

Comedy is an amazing calling. Once you get that first laugh, it's hard to turn away. Then, of course, you're hooked and you have to learn how to survive in the business.

Like other kids wanted to become firemen or astronauts, I wanted to make people laugh.

When I was in third grade I taught myself ventriloquism... What's hard is to learn to be an entertainer and make people laugh. I was a few years out of college before I felt I had enough material. Then in 1988 I moved to L.A. and started to do some shows at comedy clubs.

You know, I was the class clown in Catholic school, but I never thought I would make a living out of it!

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

I've been a comedian since I was fourteen. But I've never really been a CEO.

I'm not an artist. I tell inappropriate stories and jokes and I try to make people laugh.

I made people laugh as a kid, but that's not how you make a living.

I took an acting class. After the first day, the teacher quit, so they said take another. When I saw 'How to be a Stand-up Comedian,' it resonated. I realized I'd rather make 200 people laugh than make one person cry.

About the best thing an actor can do when all is said and done is to make people laugh.

Don't you understand how dramatic it is to be a comic? To be a fool, to get people to laugh at this show-off? Milton Berle could take Laurence Olivier and stick him under the table if he wanted to. And so could I.

It seems like when I first started, people got into comedy because they wanted to be good comedians.

If I can make a teacher's salary doing comedy, I think that's better than being a teacher.

From the first time I saw Sid Caesar be funny I knew that's what I had to do.

My younger sister's a comedian. She has a sketch comedy group in Chicago called Schadenfreude and I look at her with such admiration and envy because it's such an amazing thing to make someone laugh.

I love standing at a microphone and making a room of people laugh. That's the part of the work I love; everything else is extraneous.

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

I was lucky enough to find stand-up really early in life. And I'm so grateful that I did, because the second I found it, I was like, 'I know what I want to do'.

I'll be doing stand-up for the rest of my life. The opportunities that it grants you can't be denied. Stand-up is both the hardest thing I do and the thing I enjoy most.

I'm one of the most popular cabaret performers, and I don't sing a note. And nobody expects me to sing.

Since childhood, I've been a clown. I've always liked being very funny or trying to make people laugh. It's my original self.

My whole life, I knew that I was going to be funny for a living.

I started performing non-professionally at birthday parties and family gatherings doing 'Saturday Night Live' impressions at four. Then I started for real at seven.

I got into standup because I wanted to be an actor, and then I ended up loving standup for the next eleven years.