Erik Griffin Quotes

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

My stand-up is quite good now, people say. It's just like a big conversation each time. Every gig is a rehearsal.

When I was starting out, I was just bringing a garbage bag of jokes onstage, pulling them out like, 'What about this? No? Alright.' I was just trying to be funny about anything.

When comics are in the room, people have a tendency to try to make them laugh. That doesn't really make you funnier. It makes you a comic's comic, but you aren't going to get a fan base doing that.

I started performing as a stand-up comedian on my own in the mid-1990s.

When I come out to do my stand-up set, I pretty much get bombarded with lines from movies. You try to play off it a little bit, but that's what people want to see.

When you're doing stand-up, you can comment if something fails, get a laugh from that.

Richard Lewis is the master at taking a joke that he's told a million times in a row in the past year, on the road, and making it look like he's pulling it out of thin air.

The violence or the vaudeville style of comedy is a technique all by itself. You get up there, and you are a comedian, and you're doing one thing. That is, you're going to make the audience laugh.

You can't just yell jokes at people.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

The misconception is that standup comics are always on. I don't know any really funny comics that are annoying and constantly trying to be funny all the time.

I like the purity of stand-up because it is all about whether people laugh at your jokes. Either they laugh or they don't.

Specifically in stand-up, I love jokes. I love short, structured ideas and a punchline.

Doing stand-up takes the fun out of being funny.

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.

I always tell comics you got to hang with your stand-up.

There's only one rule in stand-up, which is that you have to be funny. Yet 99 per cent of comics look and talk exactly the same.

I gravitate to ensemble comedy.

With stand-up you can just be yourself on stage. And ideally, you can't see the crowd most of the time - it's just lights in your face. But I still have had terrible stage fright.

We've all seen comedians look like they're reaching just a little bit too much for the laugh. This is counterproductive. The conceit of standup is that it is effortless, which makes the prospect of generating new comedy a tricky one: you are trying to be funny without looking like you are trying to be funny.

In my Comedy Club sets, I just work on what is fresh and try to build that show as long as I can. I don't like to do burnt material on stage. Even though my crowd loves to hear me do old stuff, I don't like to do old stuff.

I think of myself as a theatre comic instead of club comic because I tend to talk for a bit before I start being funny. I don't really do the one-liners and five second bits or whatever. But it's good to work stuff out sometimes.

'Where's Bill going?' He's going to comedy death. Boom! He pops out of it with another joke. It's my particular style.