Dita Von Teese Quotes

I used to do cabaret as a kid and always wanted to pick it up again.

When I was nine, we'd take a bus to the seaside. Coming back, we'd take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that.

I've always been a cabaret-vaudeville artist - an hourlong cabaret and a floor show in a hotel - somebody like that. That's my main forte.

In the early days of the Libertines, we used to put on Arcadian cabaret nights. There'd be some girl climbing out of an egg; we'd try and get a couple of mates to tell a few jokes, performance poets, and then we'd play in the middle of it all. More people were on stage than in the crowd.

I would just stand there puzzled, then realize this would be a great place to make a show.

I think I have always tried to connect my comedy to my art.

Every comic is really a frustrated rock star.

I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.

I grew up in Middle America and I don't think my family was very funny, but I watched 'The Princess Bride.' I always wanted to be an actor. I didn't know anything about it. I'd never seen any plays or anything and I watched that movie over and over and over again.

Cabaret is a great format. All you have to do is sing and be funny sporadically.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

We didn't know anything about comedy duos - Abbot and Costello, Martin and Lewis - we didn't know anything about that. Kim Fields showed us a tape of Martin and Lewis and their old shows and they come through the curtain so we started doing research on them.

I'm motivated by entertaining people.

It never became an act in the sense of an act. It was always, no matter where we worked, little revues.

Ever since I was a little kid, whenever my parents would have company over, I would put on shows, whether they would be magic shows, singing shows, dancing shows, little skits.

I grew up with music hall and revue and was used to filling in the little gaps here and there to get bigger audience reaction.

I'm really not into the educational aspect of performing. It's not in me.

Ever since I was 2 or 3, I loved to perform for people. I would walk up to another table in a restaurant and crack a joke, sing a song, do a dance, or something entertaining, and the 'audience' would almost always smile and laugh.

Me personally, I want to entertain people above all. When you look back at burlesque in history and the real golden age of burlesque, those entertainers were there to entertain, and there wasn't usually some big political message behind what they were doing.

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

I love the way in which I make up dances. It's a complicated way and the product is usually clear. Clear and simple. I don't need everybody to know that there are all of these fabulous things going on. If you CAN see it, that's wonderful.

I know I was influenced by Beatrice Lillie. I must have been.

I've always wanted to do a cabaret.

I love Tim Minchin, Bill Bailey, and Hans Teeuwen, and I'm trying to synthesise elements of theatre into my show a little bit more.

That's what comedy is like: You have to force yourself out in the world because you're always one experience away from new material.