Mitch Hedberg Quotes

When I started performing I was like, "Holy hell, how am I going to survive this?" I was giving it my all in 15 minutes but now I had to do it for two hours.

Once I get out onstage, it's the same sort of basic production that it is anywhere else. But I might be a little bit aware that there might be people I know out there, who wondered where I was.

When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.

Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will - all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.

But if applause throws off your timing, then you're not the kind of comedian I would like to see. All you have to do is stand there and take it.

So much of performing is a mind game. You're memorizing thousands of notes, and if you start thinking about it in the wrong way, everything can blow up in your face.

I used to do a lot of comedy. I don't know what happened. I think it's my face.

I'm just not one of those naturally funny, relaxed actors who enjoy the spotlight and are so good at it.

The audience changes every night. You're the same person. You have to speak your mind and do the stuff that you think is funny and makes you laugh.

I don't know how you can do comedy once every two weeks. Ever since I started, if I'm off for three days, I got to learn how to do comedy again.

I knew at an early age that I wanted to pursue comedy.

When I perform live, I'm doing a lot, but I kind of black out. I don't think about it too much.

To be honest, I am scared of acting, and moreover, I want to be perfect on the musical stage first.

I have always wanted to do comedy.

[sam] Kinison, when he started out, he'd come to Canada when I was first starting, and he'd always [bomb].

Although I do stand-up - doing actual stage work is terrifying for me.

Anybody can go onstage and be dirty. You have to be funny, that's the key. You can say anything as long as it's funny. You can't take it too seriously up there. And people coming to see you can't take it too seriously.

I was the class clown, but I was a reluctant class clown because I was always and still am somewhat embarrassed by performing. I have terrible stage fright, and I don't like being in front of people.

I learned as a young man that I don't write jokes, but that I can deliver more mundane material and get a laugh. I call myself a humorist.

You gotta have the balls to go out there and be funny, man.

I mean, stand up you're by yourself and it's live and when you're acting, unless you're doing a monologue, you're interacting with somebody else. Even if you're doing a monologue you're saying it to somebody and it's not live so you can do it a few times.

I've never done a comedy club in my life. It's weird because I don't have the same background as most comics. I don't have a history of going up and only doing eight minutes.

When people asked me, "Do you get high to go onstage?" I could never understand the question. I mean, I'd been high since eight that morning.

I don't think I've ever died on stage. I've had jokes that died on stage. I've told a joke and absolutely nothing. They didn't know it was the end of the joke.

I remember thinking as I was doing the jokes for the first time, "If I can hear that very clearly, I'm not hearing laughter." It just became deafening, this buzzing noise. I mean, it was brutal. It was really terrible. Then I remember thinking, "At least nobody important, or anyone who I really respect, saw that." And then literally right when I went off the stage, Jerry Seinfeld got up and went on. So I was like, "Oh great. Seinfeld saw me bomb." On the other hand, I thought, "At least no one will be thinking of me anymore. They'll just be focusing on him."