You say you're a comedian, you always have to be on guard.
I'm a standup comedian who gets to act. I'm never going to not do standup. I love doing it and when I go through periods where I'm doing a lot of acting work, I still do standup.
Jerry Seinfeld, he was doing Letterman show all the time, so he kind of had an excuse, that people know the jokes already. He didn't have time to do stand-up. A guy like me, I have no excuses.
I've been a comedian since I was fourteen. But I've never really been a CEO.
I really love standup because it's something that I've been literally doing for 40 years, which means I'm a thousand years old.
For my first gig, I got $75. I could make money being funny, so I pursued it as a career and have turned it into a lucrative business.
When I got a part in 'All American Girl,' in 1994, I remember thinking, 'Now I have a series, I'm not going to need to do standup,' but every night I'd go out afterward and get onstage somewhere.
I'm like the master of ceremonies being funny, and then sometimes people you're with, girlfriends and stuff, are like, 'God I wish I had the person on stage to be with all the time.'
Back when Jerry Seinfeld was just another comedian hanging around the clubs, I'd imitate him to amuse myself and the other comics. The club owners would say, 'What are you doing that for? Nobody knows him.'
I personally think Miles Davis is a lot funnier than me. And he's working more.
The first year or so on The Daily Show is pretty intense in terms of travel. You're going to the worst places in the country, talking to the craziest people in the world.
I didn't really want to be a comedian.
As a stand-up comic, you have to do the road.
I love standing at a microphone and making a room of people laugh. That's the part of the work I love; everything else is extraneous.
The bad thing about being a famous comedian is that every now and then someone approaches me to tell an old joke. Don't tell me jokes - I have that. People also say the weirdest things, sometimes sarcastic things, and even evil things. They like to provoke to get a reaction.
In giving birth, I knew that I would have to take a break after I had a baby; I just didn't know that it would be, like, six weeks long. Taking a six-week break was a very big deal for me. I have never taken that long of a break from stand-up other than my honeymoon, which was 14 days long.
The whole idea of celebrity is flattering - it helps you get into restaurants and stuff - but once you obtain some creative fulfillment, which you do on a nightly basis as a comedian, it's hard to give that up just to be the wacky neighbor on a show.
Once you become a comedian, you accept that people are just going to yell stuff at you.
I don't like to travel. I go out. When you do stand up, you travel a lot. Just working out. I don't really enjoy it. I like New York. There's nothing really like New York. Everything just becomes a worse version of New York.
Comedy has been so good to me.
I started doing stand up when I was 19. Because I was underage at the time, at certain clubs I would be forced to wait outside until it was my time to go on stage. Then I would do my set, walk off, and be kicked out again.
Writing books is fun because after I do a show for a couple hours, I'm in a bus for 22 hours. It's not hard for me to look out the window and tell a joke here and there.
Johnny Carson is a comedian who is seen every night in millions of bedrooms all over America...and that's why his last wife left him.
I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-'60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn't the night before.
I'm so lucky to do what I do, traveling across the country and making people laugh.
