Comedy Exposure Quotes

There was just a lot of comedy on the TV in the house, and my parents are both very funny.

HBO was a big thing for stand-up, and when you're a broke kid with absolutely nothing to do on the weekend, there was always video recording your HBO specials. I would just rewind those specials and watch them like they were new again.

I find I've always been judgmental about comedy (laughs) and it's hard to turn that off, really. But what constant exposure to live comedy does is it makes you give people a second chance.

A young comic, if he's any good, can easily get on 'Carson' or 'Griffin' or 'Dinah Shore,' because they want to say the same thing, that they discovered the new talent.

In keeping with the theme of "I got my hands on," my brother and I would listen to The Diceman Cometh. That was the dirtiest thing we'd ever heard, and we could listen to that at full volume without fear of penalty, because my mom couldn't hear that either. I wasn't a huge comedy fan growing up, but I definitely listened to Andrew Dice Clay a lot.

I was raised by a dad who has a fantastic sense of humor who raised me on 'The Muppet Show,' Steve Martin movies, and Woody Allen's standup, and he really encouraged me to ham it up from an early age.

On MySpace ... the whole demographic of the stand-up comedy fan has changed. It's like an indie band thing. People think they've discovered you.

If you're at the Comedy Store or the Laugh Factory or the Improv, even two minutes helps. You never know who might be in the audience.

Standups have all the talk shows, but you never see a sketch group on a talk show. Even on so-called variety shows, if you do see a sketch group or character, it's written specifically for that variety show and usually written around the host of the show or a celebrity.

When I started stand-up - and this is in the '90s - there was definitely people hadn't watched decades of Comedy Central, where people are really much more educated on stand-up comedy.

Being on 'SNL' gives you a unique experience that almost no one else has. It's like Harvard for the comic actor.

Every city you go to has television and radio talk shows that are dying to give young comics a showcase. They all want to be able to say that so-and-so started here, got his first break on this show.

I started watching 'The Stooges' religiously and obsessively when I was probably about four or five years old till around the age of 18.

I found a great deal of relief and excitement watching comics when I was very young. My grandmother was very into them and so was my grandfather. They had a profound effect on me, so I just found myself watching comedians on the after-school shows: Merv Griffin and that kind of stuff.

I grew up in a pretty strict household in the sense that we just didn't have cable, so I wasn't familiar with what stand-up comedy was. I remember telling my friends that I thought stand-up comedy was like the thing that happened before the episode of 'Seinfeld.'

I've grown up around some incredibly funny people, which has been a blessing and curse because now I've been completely spoiled in terms of what I find funny.

There really is no Johnny Carson anymore. There is no one place a comedian can appear and explode.

I feel like being a door person was like college in a sense. I could watch comedy on a professional level seven nights a week without paying, and they would pay me a nominal amount of money to be there.

When I came to America, it was Dave Chappelle and a lot of comedians on ComicView. That was my first exposure to stand up comedy, actually.