comedian persona Quotes

For me, comedy is constantly presented as this fake casualness, like a guy just walked on stage going, 'This crazy thing happened to me the other day.' And he's in front of 3000 people, and he's acting like an everyman, and he's getting paid so much money.

What's great about stand-up unlike athletes and other things when you get old you get old and rusty.

I was kind of a Rickles comic to begin with. I was caustic, and I was abusive and mean to the audience.

I'm standing behind a wall of jokes. You don't know about my personal life, my girlfriends, or what I do when I'm not on the road. There's this guy, this comedian, and this is how he thinks, but people really don't know anything about me.

I don't consider myself, you know, in real life one of those funny guys. My comedy comes through my work.

That I walk around calling people 'dummy' and 'hockey puck'. I do have a different life apart from being sarcastic on stage. I might kibitz around with my friends, but I'm nothing like the person who does stand up. Nothing like that.

I was like a Borscht Belt comedian trapped in the body of a 6-year-old. I was channeling Jackie Mason at 7.

Any comedian who tells you how dark and dangerous they are, they're not dark and dangerous.

I've never been able to tell jokes. In the beginning of my career I did impressions and jokes like any other comedian, but I was never very successful because I did it poorly. So I started to talk to the audience and started talking about the atmosphere around me and started to become angry, not in a mean-spirited way, but in a fun way - and my attitude developed from there.

It was important to me to be cool as a comedian. I didn't want to be a crowd-pleaser who sent out the vibe of, "I need you guys." I wanted to be so cool that the audience could leave and I would still be killing, that I didn't want to have to rely on them or need them. That really appealed to me.

I drink Peet's Coffee, and they're a very authentic company. They don't try to be something that they're not, and I think that's reflective in my comedy as well.

I don't think comedians make an active decision to be a certain "persona." Comedians write the way they're going to write.

My favorite comedians are basically themselves onstage.

I definitely look like a toddler. I feel comfortable and I have a lot of fun out there [John Mulaney Show]. And if I were to be extremely egotistical, I'd say I got a tiny bit better.

I didn't plan to be the rude middle-class comedian. You write a certain type of joke that you find funny, and mine happen to be often rude. Yes, it's juvenile, but that's me.

Kids seem to get me when I play colleges - they like it because I go after them. They'll come up after and say I am like their dads, only funny.

There's an audience that is paid to laugh at my jokes. I'm playing a character while I'm doing stand-up. Real stand-ups, man, they're playing themselves. I'd be far too terrified.

I'm a very straightforward person. But that's fine for a comedian. Because a lot of times you're talking about everyone else.

Just from my own experience, a lot of the comedians I used to work with were miserable in their actual lives. I think you need to be able to see a lot of negative in things in order to extract material, so there's probably something to that. A lot of the people I used to work with were very, very, very unfunny offstage, so that's a pretty common thing.

I don't know the secret of Mrs. Brown, but what I do know is that there are things that Mrs. Brown says and does that Brendan O'Carroll couldn't get away with. I think maybe it's a leniency that they're with an old woman. It's the old woman thing. I think secretly we all just want to be Joan Rivers.

I'm trying to think if there was ever the Lenny Bruce-y, observational, George Carlin kind of magician: "You know what I hate is ..." I don't think that ever existed.

I wish, in some ways, I was the type of comedian who could do something blistering and topical, but I'm the guy who gets stuck in the revolving door and thinks I should write about that.

I would still have old ladies come up to me after the show and pat me on the cheek after I had said all this vulgar stuff. They would be like, 'Oh you're a silly boy - we know you're just playing.

When we were on the bus doing the Mr. Show Hooray for America Tour there was a lot of laughter and a lot of pot smoking and a lot of speed metal listening and video game playing. Of course that was all Brian Posehn.

Stand-up is the place where you can do things that you could never do in public.