Marlon Wayans Quotes

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.

Getting onstage and trying out all of my material and what works well with audiences and what doesn't, what works well in different atmospheres, has been the best training.

I can never tell when something is funny. I just have to do it onstage and find out.

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

My goal is just to become a better comedian.

What's great about having an audience is they can let you know what they don't think is funny, and you can just cut that out and keep trying.

Not everyone can be as successful a performer as myself, who gave 10 great performances the first time I ever did comedy, and then toiled in obscurity for years.

It took forever for me to get work because I was a political comic, and now it's become good business, and God knows how long that'll last. You have to do it night after night after night to kind of make it. I still find myself on 'Piers Morgan' or on some show and I think, 'I hope this is funny.'

Sometimes you try a song and people don't respond, or you tell a story and you just hear crickets. But when you play thousands of shows, you start to refine stuff.

So much of a stand-up's life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.

If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned laughter is cheating.

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 great thing about a sitcom is that you're in front of a live audience, so you really get in touch with what audience reaction is, but also there are lots of elements of film that you're dealing with, and there's kind of a great boot camp or graduate school mentality to it, because you're going to suck.

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.

Lewis Black taught me stand-up.

There's no real preparing at home for stand-up. You just go and you just do it.

I don't have any type of sketch-comedy or stand-up background.

There aren't any concrete steps to becoming a comic.

For me, there's nothing more valuable as an actor, or better way to learn, than getting to perform in front of a live audience, no matter where you are. Whether it's on Broadway, in Florida, or doing a tour.

If you do live shows long enough as a comedian, you can still hear that rhythm of laughing. It's ingrained in you, and it's not something you can really teach somebody. It comes from doing hours and hours and hours and years and decades on stage, performing in front of live crowds.

It's a really nice way to cut your teeth, doing live shows. It's like going to the gym because you do have to think fast. You are constantly under the threat of people not laughing. Instead of getting hit, people could just not laugh, so you really are trying to mine quickly for the funniest thing you could say in that moment.

To become the best comedian, I must be well-rounded.

It's important that when you do standup, you do small places like coffee shops and also big places like colleges. It helps you find the little nuances in your set that don't work, and you can shave off the excess.

If you pay attention, stand-up can be great improv training ground. But one of the things that helped me the most was doing warm-up for the 'Mr. Show' tapings way back when.

If you haven't truly died a million times as a comic you haven't gigged enough!