Chris Rock Quotes

I never used to tell jokes on stage. Now I'm cutting up jokes all night long.

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

You know, stand-up comedy is where I pretty much started out.

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.

One of my greatest inspirations for stand-up was Jonathan Winters. He was a genius. One thing about him, and also Lenny Bruce, is that they were in the tradition of the one-man show. That's why Richard Pryor was so great, and George Carlin, too. They prowled the stage, they used voices, they were really talents.

I still do standup.

I've been doing stand-up since '89.

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.

I will always love to perform standup comedy.

Stand-up don't get no respect - it's the hardest thing to do in show business. You don't have no band and there's no music.

I do comedy shows. I make fun of myself, first of all.

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

I'm a frustrated stand-up comic. If you hand me a microphone and I get one laugh, then I'll go on for 20 minutes.

I love hecklers. They remind you that you are a comedian.

Stand-up is kind of like my home base, and doing stand-up in New York is what I like doing most.

Yeah, I do stand-up, my own type of stand-up.

Live stand-up is my thing. I love being on stage and just messing around.

I don't really do stand-up.

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'll never stop doing stand-up. There's nothing better than getting in front of 2,500 people and making an entire room laugh.

Sometimes I start off shows by explaining to people that it's just a bunch of stories - I always say 'It's like standup, just less funny.'

A lot of people get into stand-up as a back door into acting or something. But I really like writing jokes and telling jokes.

At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is like acting when the audience are the other characters that I'm acting with.

To this day, to this very day, except for television, I've never had a writer. Anything I've ever done on the stage, happened on the stage and I developed it from there. It started doing impressions and jokes - which I did very poorly. To this day I can't tell a joke. That sounds nuts, but it's true. I exaggerate it and it becomes a joke. Everything I've ever done I've done out on the stage and it became a performance over many many years.

Performing comedy, you develop a rhythm of ideas and laughs. I live for it.