Comedian Quotations

I think it's great training for any comedian to start on cows. Because with cows, you expect them to be bored and just stare at you blankly. And that's exactly what you'll get at a comedy club. If you can toughen up with a cow audience, then you'll never be worried with a human audience.

The one thing an audience always has in common with a comedian is troubles. The Yiddish word for that is tsuris. You're always putting your tsuris on stage whether you like it or not. No one is untroubled, unless they're just, you know, an imbecile.

You never have a comedian who hasn't got a very deep strain of sadness within him or her. Every great clown has been very near to tragedy.

Comedians tend to find a comfort zone and stay there and do lamer versions of themselves for the rest of their career.

The trouble with most comedians who try to do satire is that they are essentially brash, noisy and indelicate people who have to use a sledge hammer to smash a butterfly.

I think humor is important for all of us, and a great comedian is a great treasure.

I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

I'm all about showing people that I'm a little messed up, I have a lot of the same problems you have. By exposing myself and putting myself out there, people can relate to me and my act won't grow stale. I mean, nobody wants to hear a comedian say, 'Life is great.'

I've loved the Internet space in terms of creative content control and ownership, the things I haven't had since I started as a stand-up comedian.

It doesn't bother me that I'm not a household word on the East Coast. Baton Rouge, Raleigh, Minneapolis - I'm so popular in these cities where you've never imagined an East Coast comedian working.

I'm not very big on politics. I'm a comedian and not that smart. I don't have the mind capacity for it.

Performers like Tommy Cooper, who are always getting things wrong, are much more endearing than comedians who are sassy and smart.

One of the biggest misconceptions about me is that I'm a comedian, which I'm not. A comedian is someone who can stand up in front of an audience and make you laugh. I've never done stand-up and I never will. I'm a comic actor. My comedy comes through my characters.

I'm a comedian, which is the opposite of a lifestyle that equips you to be a parent.

Professional comedians, surprisingly, have a lack of humor. They're insensitive to the insanity of our times.

I am pleased to say that I am not a tortured comedian - I laugh a lot. My twenties weren't particularly happy, but it's the same for a lot of people. In your thirties, you realise that your life and your worries are really insignificant, and you have to force yourself to be more positive and take each day as a gift.

Yes, I'm known as America's most genuine comedian.

But I will say that most comedians are the saddest people I know. That is the biggest paradox to me.

I spent more time in America, but I developed a very English sense of humour. I clicked into it deeply with Peter Sellers, who is still probably my favourite comedian.

It's good to be funny when you are a comedian.

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

Comedians still make fun of Bill's out-of-control appetites, but with Hillary, the mockery is about how she lets nothing be out of control.

Comics write to their point of view. If you're an exceedingly irreverent comedian, you've got to see where that point of view fits or produces the most funny.

The truth is, for however much my stories come out of things that have happened to me, they're not darkly or as deeply personal as someone like Marc Maron or a lot of comedians, but they are essentially my life and my interpretation of it.

As much experience, education and awareness as one can attain is important for a comedian.

What makes a comedian has nothing to do with religion. Think of Red Skelton, Jimmy Durante, Jackie Gleason, who were all Catholics.

I'm not interested in being one of those comedians who wants to look good and be this 'cool' funny person. I don't care how weird or ugly I look.

I owe my whole acting career to the fact that I'm a singer. I went out to Los Angeles and auditioned for a TV show called 'Fame L.A.' The original role was for a comedian, but they said I wasn't very funny, so they asked me, 'What else can you do?' So I played a singer.

The real good comedians, like Chaplin, would make you laugh and a second later, cry

I don't consider myself a comedian because I don't really concern myself too much with jokes.

But it's fun to be something, have that, and you don't have to be real. It's like, comedians. They go on and they're doing all these jokes. I would be like that if I were more awake

When they put me in jail, that's when they turned me into an activist. Up until the time I went to jail, I was just a comedian.

I guess ultimately a lot of comedians just wanna be taken seriously.

I've had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware.

I didn't become a comedian to work this hard.

If you think something's funny, go with that. Most comedians pull jokes from a place of honesty.

Part of being a comedian is that it's your job to look at life and regurgitate it in a funny way, to point out its absurdities.

I've been pitching a show of five female stand-up comedians through the generations, from Phyllis Diller to Amy Schumer, so when I got an e-mail asking me if I would participate in the Women in Comedy Festival, I was thrilled.

I wasn't even a big comedy nerd. A lot of the comedians I know - a lot of my friends are comedians - they knew a lot about comedy growing up.

The Internet has done nothing but good for comedy all around. Comedians no longer have to rely on TV execs and club owners deciding if they are funny or not.

My interest in magic was kindled by Steve Martin, the comedian I'd gone to high school with.

Even as a little child, I've always had that comedian kind of attitude.

You can't do anything to be funny. That's cringeworthy. If your humor comes out of a place of love every time, you don't make the joke bigger than you. The funniest comedians are in touch with their emotional level.

I was with a famous comedian when a young fan walked up and asked for an autograph. The comedian blew him off. I'll never forget the look on the young boy's face. He was devastated.

I'm an actor, I'm not a comedian, I never was a comedian.

I think, first of all, you need to love what you're doing, and then this helps in the comedian for its part in everything-but the moment you enjoy what you're doing, you try to express yourself, to find your way, and every time is different, of course.

I mean, sometimes... a comedian becomes an actor, and they just don't deliver, because the bottom line of comedy is to be funny, and the bottom line of acting is to be truthful, and they get that mixed up sometimes, or don't even notice that that's the thing.

It's funny, because I was trained as a dramatic actor at New York's Colonnades Theater Lab in the '70s, along with Jeff Goldblum, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. People I worked with there saw a comedian in me. I'm still most at home in comedy.

We were against the war in Vietnam and for voter registration and social issues. Everybody has their choices, and the obligation of a comedian is first to entertain. And if you're so inclined, and you have some bigger thought, make sure you express it, because that's a gift.

Let's face it, the great comedians now that are handicapped in the looks department are tremendous writers.

Half of the great comedians I've had in my shows and that I paid a lot of money to and who made my customers shriek were not only not funny to me, but I couldn't understand why they were funny to anybody.

I'm a comedian who happens to be Latino. What's the difference? The difference is, my special will air on Comedy Central, not Telemundo.

I believe it is important for comedians to know who came before them.

I guess I considered myself just sort of a sketch comedian, you know? Actual screenwriting hadn't really occurred to me as a viable job - I didn't really know anything about it.

A comedian's body is funny as well as his mind being funny, his whole personage is funny.

I don't know any comedian who tailors his act to his audience. Maybe people say they do, but I can't even imagine them.

I've never tried to pass myself off as anything more than a comedian who wrote a dating book.

Comedians... they're different from actors. There's more ego there. They create the whole thing, I guess, so they're more precious.

When I think of myself, I'm definitely... I'm not like a comedian.

A comedian sees the world bent. I'm tangent to the circle.

Once you become a comedian, you accept that people are just going to yell stuff at you.

I don't consider myself a political comedian because it's so hard. It takes time away from me saying terrible things about TV.

I would probably be a teacher if I weren't a comedian.

I think Flip Wilson is a brillant comedian.

You have to understand how bad I wanted to be a comedian, how much I loved doing it. I still can't believe I get to do this for a living and have people come up and want to see me.

When you see a comedian on stage, the best comedians make it feel like a conversation. But it's not. We have very little interest in what an audience has to say during a performance. Being a stand-up comedian, you're an egomaniac to some degree. Everyone wants to hear what you have to say, apparently. That's not how real relationships work.

Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians.

I think for comedians, acting is their natural progression. It's all about progression.

All comedians are, in a way, anarchists. Our job is to make fun of the existing world.

People expect comedy from me but I am not just a stand-up comedian anymore. I act on stage, host 'Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa' and also conduct interviews on my show. I have grown as a person and an artiste.

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.

When I see a good singer, I get teary-eyed. Part of it is jealousy because all comedians are frustrated rock stars. That's a fact.

When you go to standup, there seems to be a common denominator of some form of need or want for validation from the audience that maybe you were lacking as a kid.

I pushed against doing a podcast for so long. I'm a very late comer to the podcast game. But you're responsibility as a comedian is to get your viewpoints out into the world, and we have a lot more avenues to do that. So it's a lot more opportunity, but really have to work all the time.

Music is very similar to comedy: It's all about texture, timing, context, vocabulary, performance. When someone's onstage doing a solo, essentially it's the same thing as what a comedian does. They're in the moment. They're listening.

I'm not a comedian. I'm an actor who just happens to be funny on occasion.

I would say most comedians have a very cynical worldview of the way the world can work. It's almost like if you didn't, you couldn't be a comedian.

Because I'm around comedians all the time, in my downtime I tend not to watch comedy. Something the whole family enjoys is 'You've Been Framed!' It satisfies all of us. It's universal, and we all laugh a lot.

The idea of a Japanese comedian was not only a rarity, it was non-existent.

The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

It seems like when I first started, people got into comedy because they wanted to be good comedians.

I started out as a stand-up comedian. And that's what I'm most comfortable doing.

A comedian's a comedian. They're a very kind of cynical bunch. I guess that's why I like them.

I'm the only comedian qualified to navigate a supertanker.

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 'Wizard of Oz.' I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.

I really understood a lot more about comedy after listening to Bill Hicks, who died at 32 years old. He's probably the best comedian who ever lived. Although you can't say that because of Carlin, Cosby and Pryor.

I was a film-directing major at NYU. I'm still not sure why I became a directing major, when I was really an actor and a comedian, but there was something that drew me to doing that.

I do a lot of Vegas work and work with the comedians.

I think it's a comedian's job to make everything funny. Nothing is off-limits.

There's something about being a parent that has, I think, made me a better comedian.

It's always funny until someone gets hurt. Then it's just hilarious.

Christians have always been fodder for comedians who have tended to portray them as anoraks - slightly clammy, beatifically smiley dullards with barely a personality between them.

Old radio comedy makes me laugh, as well as 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' and comedians like Paul Merton.

The violence or the vaudeville style of comedy is a technique all by itself. You get up there, and you are a comedian, and you're doing one thing. That is, you're going to make the audience laugh.

I was an actor before becoming a comedian.

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.

The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to do a documentary on your life and you're watching it with an audience and there's not a laugh.

I think having an outsider's viewpoint is interesting and good, especially for a comedian.

I wanted to do - there was this film called 'Magic' that Anthony Hopkins did. And the director wanted me. The writer wanted me. Joe Levine said no, I don't want any comedians in this.

I'm not a comedian, but I love the comedians who know when to get off the stage.