Comedy Skills Quotes

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.

I'm not a comedian. I didn't study sketch comedy; my background isn't that.

I knew I wanted to be in show business so I took the path of least resistance. I loved comedy. But you never know you are funny until people laugh. It's just what I was interested in. I could make people laugh, I guess, but doing it at school and doing it onstage are very different things.

You can teach somebody how to be a brain surgeon, but you cannot teach them how to walk on a stage and make people laugh.

The really good stand up comedians can be angry but relatable, and they have interestingly humanizing personalities. Their observational skills are far greater than mine, so I'll just stick to reading lines off a page.

The beautiful thing about stand-up advice is that it applies to anybody, any gender, any race, any age. The best thing you can do - everybody will tell you - is get on stage as much as you can. I would add to that: get on stage as much as you can - with the people you admire.

I needed to start pulling at this other sort of funnier, lighter side. So I auditioned for everything. I auditioned for 'Friends,' even.

Eddie Murphy was the Michael Jordan of comedy. He had a full range of abilities.

I've always been a figure skater and ballet dancer. I love physical comedy, and any chance that I get to do that... that is so me.

Although no one explicitly wants a president who could have a reliable fall back career in stand-up comedy, everyone shudders at the thought of a Rutherford B. Hayes or John Kerry.

I moved to New York and went to a performing arts college, but it wasn't until UCB that I started performing on the regular, figuring out how I'm funny, why I'm funny, and how to play with an audience.

In comedy, my strengths are improvisation.

Just because you don't know how to do stand-up doesn't mean you don't know how to put on a show.

My gift was in comedy. I found out I could make jokes. I could tell jokes. I could write them. So over the years, that's what I've done.

I enjoy doing drama, and I enjoy doing comedy equally.

I also think if you're an actor and you can improvise, when you go on an audition and you can improvise you're just a genius. If you can, you know, take a Tide commercial and you can just say one funny line that's not in the commercial they think you're a genius.

I grew up with music hall and revue and was used to filling in the little gaps here and there to get bigger audience reaction.

People like Bill Murray are incredible at what they do and are definitely my flavour. Although Will Ferrell, Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais are also incredible actors. In their comedy, they make these stupid people feel so real. These guys are really setting the bar very high, and I learn as much from them about acting as I do about comedy.

I'm one of those performers who has done just about everything except juggle, and I'm working on that.

I joined an improv comedy group. Ours was named 'Quick Fire!' with an exclamation point. It was when I auditioned for that team and got on it and felt like... I'll just say I felt like I was good at it.

Lewis Black taught me stand-up.

I have been fortunate to be able to have a career playing comedy and drama. And it's awfully hard - it's like apples and pears to compare the two.

I went to Second City, where you learned to make the other actor look good so you looked good and National Lampoon, where you had to create everything out of nothing, and SNL, where you couldn't make any mistakes, and you learned what collaboration was.

I'm slightly obsessed with drag queens and performers. Their quips and their one-liners, their style, their singing... I find it fascinating. And thoroughly entertaining. I'd love to play one.

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