Humor Performance Quotes

Shall I crack any of those old jokes, master, At which the audience never fail to laugh?

For the first actual comedy-comedy I did, I took a comedy class in New York, which was full of slightly unhinged people. It was a pretty depressing crowd, very angry and strange people. But then I took a class at the Upright Citizens Brigade, and I loved those people.

My mom was like, 'Get your law degree first, become a lawyer, and then you can tell jokes on the weekends. You can be a lawyer and just throw jokes into your presentations.' Now she's like, 'Listen, you need to come up with new material.' All of a sudden, my mom's a critic.

I love hecklers. They remind you that you are a comedian.

The first impression that I liked doing was an impression of Cheri Oteri's Barbara Walters impression on 'SNL.' I found that I could mimic that pretty well, and people got a kick out of that.

I sometimes use a girl singer the way Henny Youngman uses his violin - as a bridge between one laugh and the next.

The best comedy I ever did was when people didn't know who I was.

Let's not call physical comedy falling down and pratfalls. All humor is physical, no matter how you dish it out. It's timing, like a dancer or an athlete would have.

I've been doing stand-up for 15 years and I've never even been invited to the Comedy Awards! How mental is that?

I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.

If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.

Something about New York, man: You can do more comedy there probably than you can anywhere in the world. If you're interested in being funny, New York is the place to go.

The truth of it is that people are not going to want to go to improvisational theater if it's not funny. You can succeed in doing all the things you're supposed to do - be truthful to scene - and if it's not funny, I'm telling you that no one's gonna care.

A comic says funny things. A comedian says things funny.

Girls are supposed to be feminine and demure. Comedy isn't about that, so you just have to unlearn it. Certain women are so pretty, they can't go weird enough to be funny. You have to be willing to be ugly. I'm lucky my face can look so hideous.

I do comedy shows. I make fun of myself, first of all.

I make a lot of jokes about vegetarians in my act but most of them don't have the strength to protest.

You wouldn't know how to perform a sketch that you don't find funny. You just couldn't do it.

I wouldn't call myself a standup in the presence of Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock, but I do my share of it and it has been and remains part of my activity and I like it.

There are comics in L.A. doing impressions, and the first thing they do is hunch over and then start to do this bad Rick Moranis voice I do as well when I really get going. It's pretty horrible.

When comics are in the room, people have a tendency to try to make them laugh. That doesn't really make you funnier. It makes you a comic's comic, but you aren't going to get a fan base doing that.

I like to hold the microphone cord like this, I pinch it together, then I let it go, then you hear a whole bunch of jokes at once.

When I was ten, I wrote an essay on what I would be when I grew up and said I would be a professional soccer player and a comedian in off season.

Fans feel they know me, so they want me to be on-the-spot funny, and it's hard to fulfil their expectations.

Let's do some comedy. I always like to add some comedy to my show. Those who've seen me before might know that.