James Veitch Quotes

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

It takes many years to be a great comedian.

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

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.

I did so many open mics. I would write jokes on Twitter constantly, and then slowly, over time, open mics turned into shows. If you can get a joke to work at an open mic, it's a good joke.

I've been performing stand-up comedy for ten years, it's what I love and will always do.

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.

I've been doing stand-up since '89.

I will always do stand-up, even if my acting career takes off. Stand-up is my life.

I wanted to make a living, but I really was not interested in money at all. I was interested in being a great comedian.

With comedy, it's really hard to tell if something's working on the page - you really need the actors to bring it alive. The scariest part is if people will laugh or not.

But television, when I was doing it, was all about scoring. You had to make these jokes bang, do whatever you could to make the material really pop. And if it didn't, there was something wrong with the material, or with you.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

As much experience, education and awareness as one can attain is important for a comedian.

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.

I definitely am a performer, and there are different styles of stand-up; I mean, some people are writers and they get onstage to get jokes out, and that's definitely not what I do. I like to just go up and, if I'm telling a story about someone, I'll play his or her part.

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.

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 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.

I'd been to the Comedy Store, and I loved the terror of it and the way the best comedians could control the crowd. What confidence that would give you, if you could somehow survive.

If I'm not in the theatre, I'm in an open mic night or doing a guest set at the Comedy Club, or whatever, just trying to develop stuff.

Early on, I had a girlfriend come see me, and she was like, 'Yeah, it was good, but you were funny at a dining hall at the University of Maryland.' That's when I realized I was contrived. I was reciting jokes. So I really worked on - no matter what - sounding like I was just talking to the people.

I think I probably would have gone into stand-up.

I feel the life expectancy of a comedian is 30 seconds. If you don't hook an audience in half-a-minute, you're dead.