Phyllis Diller Quotes

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.

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.

Typically, when you're with your friends, premises are coming up left and right. But when you're on stage, you must create the premise. So you have to create the premise, paint the picture and then deliver the punch line.

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

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.

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

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

It's not most important to communicate myself on stage as it is to be as funny or interesting as I possibly can on stage. I feel more like I'm doing a play whose main character just happens to share my name.

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.

There's no room for failure performing [stand-up] for a black audience. If you don't get them right away it's tough winning them back even if you're doing top-notch material. If you didn't win them right when you walked out there, it's tough.

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.

Doing comedy is as easy as doing anything else. You're dependent totally on the material.

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.

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.

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.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

My stand-up has always been very character-based. I'm not really the kind of person that's like, 'Hey, here's what's on my mind! Tip your waitress!' I would create the jokes based on the character I was playing. It was always a performance-based thing for me.

Everyone tells me I need to do comedy. It's never something that crossed my mind, but to be able to do a true comedy and make people laugh, that would be great.

The hardest thing in the world to depict dramatically is stand-up.

Even writing a script which will be funny is not easy. To make the script come to life and make the audience laugh, I will call myself more of an actor if I am able to do that.

I think comedy is the most difficult thing in the world, I really do.

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.

And as a stand-up comic, that's the one thing I'm a little uncomfortable with. I'm not uncomfortable with sincerity in my regular life, but, like in terms of my product that I offer, I think that it's weird, because comics used to be way more sincere in the '80s.

Comedy's easy for me now - it's all about timing and the way you deliver lines. I use facial expressions to get the point across.