Touring Comedian Quotes

I never wanted to be road comic.

When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I'd get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.

Richard Lewis is the master at taking a joke that he's told a million times in a row in the past year, on the road, and making it look like he's pulling it out of thin air.

I started selling out comedy clubs before I got to town with no advertising. I was selling out theaters just on the rumor that I was going to be there.

No matter what town we went to, if there was a comedian playing, I'd go watch.

A lot of women do stand-up as a gateway into acting, but I love stand-up, and to be a good stand-up, you have to go on the road a lot. It means going to places in America where they've never seen a Vietnamese person in their life.

When you do late-night TV, you do different jokes in the same place every night. When you're on the road as a comedian, you do the same jokes in a different place every night.

There have been times when I played more than others, but I've been a road comic for a quarter of a century, so I've always played golf on the road because you have a lot of time to kill.

Comedians do movies and TV so that when they tour, they sell out. That's the goal: To get popular enough so the place is packed.

Theo does comedy now, and he's traveling around the country doing comedy, and I actually just saw him, he's from Louisiana, and I just saw him when I went home to visit my family in Louisiana. I saw his comedy show and he was brilliant.

As a comedian, especially one that works as much as I do, there is a lot of sacrifice. People don't see that I'm away from my family 46 weeks out of the year. I miss all the birthdays and anniversaries and holidays.

Actors, you have to wait for people to give you work, or you have to make your own stuff. But standup, I could just say, 'I want to do standup in 30 minutes,' and I can go do standup. Or I could just say, 'I want to do standup in a few weeks in this city.'

Think of The Rontourage as the Ron White Channel, where you can see us getting into trouble in all kinds of different places.

I don't have a lot of recreation time. I've always been under the assumption that if you're selling tickets you need to work. The kind of success that's happened to me maybe only happens to one comedian every twenty years and so I'm on the road constantly.

I'm never home. I miss birthdays. I miss holidays. I miss anniversaries. I miss special moments. I'm not always there for important times, because I'm out on the road trying to make people laugh. I give up my privacy. I give up the ability to walk somewhere and relax.

I go around the country and do a simple gag like, 'The property ladder is now a snake' and get a real laugh.

I love being on the road, but to make a living as a road comic, you have to be on it most weeks out of the year. That's just too much for me. But I would love to be such a successful road comic that I don't have to go on it every week.

I want to keep working really hard at getting better at stand-up and touring, and I can't imagine a time when I won't want to do that. But, who knows?

I do write a lot of stuff for my tours. I think I just want to give people their money's worth. They've paid to come and see jokes so I try to give them as many as I can.

I haven't been offstage for more than two days since I started doing comedy.

For me, someone like the Eddie Murphy character doesn't live anywhere; he lives on a stage and when he's not on the stage he's on a bus getting to the next stage. You don't really want to see him at home, or all those things you can do in the movie.

From 1987 to 1992, I was on the road for 40 weeks a year playing comedy clubs, and that was during the 'comedy boom.'

You start in bars and then restaurants, then you want to get into comedy clubs where you feature, then you headline, and once you sell out clubs you're into theaters. I've been able to get there, and it's cool to do that.

When I'm not filming anything or on the road doing stand-up, I'm usually doing stand-up shows every night - usually a few shows a night at different clubs in the city.