Joe Rogan Quotes

I loved Stephen Wright, and I loved Mitch Hedberg, but they seemed like geniuses you could never emulate. You'd just be ripping them off.

What they call 'alt-comedy' now is basically what comedy was like in the '80s. People tried different things, and everybody went to the clubs; there was no other place. Then somehow, the clubs became infiltrated by Dice Clay and Carrot Top types.

Every comic went through their Mitch Hedberg phase - the glasses, the hair in the face - and you knew immediately when they were doing it.

For the first six months of my stand-up career, I was talking like Danny Dyer. I was doing a lot of 'alright guvnors?' It wasn't true to who I was.

'Saturday Night Live' will always be this amazing, powerful behemoth, but it's also not the only thing happening in comedy anymore.

I worshipped guys like Bill Maher, Jay Leno, and Jerry Seinfeld, and was doing my variation of that. But as a young person with no political point of view or life experience, it was as funny as you can imagine.

Every comedian is just doing the comedy they find funny. This is me and it's not clean in any way. I could get a lot more work on TV playing clean but it's never interesting.

I used humor to avoid being picked on as a kid. Or I would try and make my parents laugh, so I wouldn't get in trouble. But as a kid, I would watch Flip Wilson and I would memorize his whole routine, listen to Bill Cosby's records constantly, Steve Martin, Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball. I just drank that stuff up and loved it.

There was something about that form of comedy that's just difficult. It never really felt like you could just fully commit to all the colors that you carry with you.

A comedian is not a person who opens a funny door - he's the person who opens a door funny.

There's the exciting part about comedy - if you catch an act just before they go mainstream, that's the best. After they hit the mainstream, everything gets watered down a little bit.

I like to think of myself as the middleman between Fred Allen and Henny Youngman.

I started doing comedy just as myself, because I thought, "This is what's expected, you're meant to tell stories and do observations." And then I started to realize that I wanted to mix it up a bit, so I started to doing songs, and I had a little keyboard onstage and would bring in little props. Then I thought about the idea of talking about a character and becoming the character onstage. So, it sort of morphed into being stand-up that was more character based, and I found that's the stuff I got the better reaction from and was more exciting for me.

I've had plenty of friends tell me that their first time doing stand-up, they do well, and then they tank for a while after that. Kind of like the first time you do a drug, you're like, "Huh! This is pretty darn good," and then you spend all your money trying to get the same high.

Maybe in 10 years,I'll only be doing "classical" comedy. Or crashing my car into trees.

It's very rare that an older comedian sort of slips into an old-school clunker. You know, you don't hear too much of that anymore.

I think comedy is on an organic upsurge right now because when I started, it was 1978 at The Comedy Store and Letterman had just stopped emceeing his morning show.

I first wanted to be a comedian when I was six or seven and my dad showed me Laurel and Hardy's "Perfect Day" on tv.

I am a guy who talks about bacon and escalators. Stand-up comedy is very much a conversation. It's very personal, stylistically.

As far as standup, everybody has a vehicle they are driving. If what you do works, it's like playing golf. If you can master that one swing over and over again, you will be successful. That's what standup is. You have to have a central move and it has to be yours. You have to own your comedy, own what you do.

My persona is most importantly just to communicate the material in a way that is most funny and meaningful in the moment. It's more like a character that's sculpted for whatever joke needs communicating at the moment.

I never had the confidence to say I was going to be in front of the camera as a comedian until I saw Eddie Murphy years later.

This is going to sound pretentious, but I like comedy that addresses something I find either worrisome or interesting in my life. I like Louis C.K.'s stuff or Bill Burr's stuff. I feel like there's comedy where someone will think of something that they think will work comedically, and then they reverse engineer that point of view so they can say that funny thing. The comedians I like, it could be an allusion, but it feels like their point of view comes first and then the jokes are a reflection of what they actually believe, or are frightened of, or are curious about, or are interested in.

Stand-up was interesting to me at the beginning, because I was trying to parody it. My early stand-up was really Andy Kaufman-esque, and then I became the very thing I was making fun of.

I'm friends with a lot of comedians, but we don't talk about material. Most comedians I know don't watch a lot of other comedy.