The best comedy I ever did was when people didn't know who I was.
When I became a standup comic, my hero, one of them, was Richard Pryor, and you know, I think that comedians, like, comedians talk about hacks, and what a hack is, is someone who does stuff that's not original.
There's a lot of brilliant comics who are amazing, but you can see them doing the same 20 minutes that they were doing five years ago, verbatim. I think that doesn't lend itself to progressing.
Stand-up comedy and poverty. Those were my two main endeavors.
Stand-up comedy is a really lonely profession: you 'perform for 2000 people, then you go to a hotel room by yourself and stare at a wall.
I stopped doing standup because it stopped being fun. And the reason it stopped being fun was it was harder to write - and this was before the Internet - it was harder to write new stuff. It had gotten so crazy.
I don't know why comedians moan about touring; you get driven to a town, stay in a hotel, work for an hour and a half with nice people, and eat fatty service station food. There's nothing not to like.
Live performance really terrifies me. I haven't done it, really, in years. I think that's why I retired from my brief career in stand-up.
With stand-up you've just got that one chance. Audiences can be quite fickle.
An actor's life is all about rejection. It's you they don't want; it's you who's too tall or too short or too fat. With stand-up, it doesn't matter what you look like.
A touring comic's typical day roughly amounts to an hour of being laughed at and 20 minutes of being photographed. The other 22 hours and 40 minutes are spent in silence.
I don't think there's hardly a comic out there that does clean material all the way around. There's a couple of guys that are clean, but I'm not one of them.
There are a lot of comics at the top end making staggering amounts of money and selling out stadiums. I think stand-up is a more intimate thing than that. Maybe because of the kind of comedy I do. It's like a discussion, but I'm the one with the microphone.
I don't go to comedy clubs unless I'm working. And when I do work, I come in, I do my time and I leave. I don't hang out.
We all know showbiz isn't easy, but being a comic - especially being a female comic - can be quite punishing.
I'm a big eater. I mean, a lot of my stand-up is about food, and you write about what you know, and that's the only thing I know. I don't know anything else.
Is it my end-all and be-all to become a standup comic? No.
The hardest part, for real, is probably when you just don't feel like going on stage and being funny.
I don't just like to use punchlines anymore, especially in arenas. They freak me out. There is nothing worse than 15,000 people waiting for a punchline.
I'm a big fan of George Carlin's.
The most dangerous place I've ever performed standup is in my home state of California.
You can play a gig as a band and not know that they hated you; with standup, after every line, you know.
Inside was the second LP album of a comedian's performance before an audience.
Every time I go onstage, it's a little less 'Chris Rock's brother.'
I like George Carlin's jokes. I like his humor. He's one of my heroes, and I like what he did with talking about everyday things.
