Richard Donner Quotes

I still love to walk on stage and make people laugh, and I work very, very hard at it, and I take it seriously.

I did a standup show called 'Show Me the Funny,' so from that I got some TV stuff and people would book me for gigs. I wasn't really good enough at that point, so had to catch up with expectations.

Stand-up comedy is something that you have to strive to do, multiple times a night, every night, to be good.

So many of these comics are just frustrated singers or actors - they want to get a gig doing a sitcom. It's paint-by-the-numbers comedy, lame joke-telling. They're drawn to it as a career move.

I never thought I'd end up doing comedy, but actually, it's been something I've really relished the challenge of and ended up doing quite a bit of.

Anybody with a sharp brain and a mic can become a comedian, but there's a need to move beyond it. The audience wants to witness the marriage of theatre, comedy and something more.

My job is mostly to entertain and be funny.

I did comedies for 10 years and I learned a great deal.

In Manhattan, I often do two or three or more shows a night, so I'm always working on new material.

At this point, I feel fairly comfortable in terms of performance. I think having a sketch background actually helps a lot. Because my background is acting, and stand-up, in a lot of ways, is acting.

If you look at any successful skit comedy show, ever, there is that format of introducing you to the player in the beginning, and then going on to see those sketches.

Stand-up comedy is all you. It's your show, it's your game. You control every aspect of it - of that experience and that expression. There's really nothing quite as satisfying.

The only way to stay sharp is to do live shows. There is no part-time comedy.

I know that, as a comedian, I've made great strides because I've worked as hard as a person can work at being at least wildly amusing.

The role of a comedian is to go in and make something funny. That might be a situation where I'm writing, a situation where I'm in control, like standup or something of my own that I'm making, or it might be something like being an actor in someone else's project.

It took me a good eight to ten years to really formulate what I was doing onstage and start to get really personal with comedy. I always really had timing naturally, it was just about trying to figure out how that timing was going to work onstage.

But with 'Newsrevue' I started doing some characters, and I just loved how you were in control. You could write something that day and go and do it that night, rather than waiting for a job that involves other people. So I did character stand-up, and then proper stand-up, and I loved it; I got addicted.

I used to do comedy during my theatre days, and I was good at that.

I continue to do standup because there's a connection with a live audience - there are skills that you do learn as a standup comedian that help you on a set.

One place that I really feel comfortable is being a comedienne. I'm very socially inept. There's so many things that I can not do in life, and this is, like, the one thing that I have mastery over. It's my world. And anybody who's coming to the show, it's like they're coming because they know that this is my world.

But I just think I was lucky enough to figure out early on that I wanted to do comedy, so that's what I put all my effort into.

I leave for the show at least an hour ahead, and I do some vocal warm-ups, and that's pretty much it.

I feel like every time I go out, I want to do a good job. I want people to say that he's just as good at stand-up as he is in some of the movies I've seen him in, so I try to do the best every time I go out there.

For me, the way I stay consistent is through stand-up comedy.

Comedy is what I really want to do and propel.