Artie Lange Quotes

Of course, you get exhausted. You want to pass out. I came close a couple of times. But you're filled with something, that feedback that comes from the audience.

I find it pressurising coming to the Voodoo Rooms to do my hour of comedy.

I'd love to give my music to someone who really likes to wow the crowd. I feel like half the time I just want to hide in the dressing room!

When you go out there to do comedy, you feel like you're doing battle with the audience a lot of the time. You're either going to get 'em, or you're not.

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 wish I didn't have to perform 'Iron Man' every night.

When you improvise, you work off the laughs from the audience, but when you step on stage to do standup, it's silent.

You feel completely in control when you hear a wave of laughter coming back at you that you have caused.

I think doing dramas kind of wears on you. It's just intense.

I sometimes use a girl singer the way Henny Youngman uses his violin - as a bridge between one laugh and the next.

Performing live is easy in front of an audience.

There's nothing like the freedom of being in a roomful of strangers and trying to make them laugh... You either sink or swim. It's like verbal boxing.

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.

Everyone knows the feeling where you're in the pub and you make your mates laugh. It's awesome, you feel like you rock. That's what comedians want with a bit of extra ego.

I don't want to be known as 'oh, Dervla, when she's on stage she's very good but she's terribly dreary', or 'another heavy night with Kirwan.'

It's easy to be silly in real life, but making stuff up onstage, that seemed hard. Better to be the funny person off-the-cuff in the room than to risk being unfunny onstage.

Performing is an exchange of a lot of energy and it can wipe you out.

In comedy, when you bomb, especially at The Comedy Store in front of a sold-out house? I think it would have been way worse if I bombed there than losing a UFC fight.

Just one night at a show in New York, I literally passed out and fell off the stage.

It's when I'm playing a headline show I feel weird, 'cause I don't know how to react to people coming out to see me.

Every time I step onto the stage, it's not only proving to the audience that I'm capable but to myself.

I think actually performing on stage when everyone's facing you and you're one person facing them, that is quite a lonely thing in a strange way. You have to be quite insular from everybody else, you've got thousands of people staring at you and you're just on your own.

When I play on stage, I have to drink a glass of water.

Plays are definitely the most difficult of them all. They are entirely a different category altogether. I don't have the courage to try out plays.

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.