Stand-up Quotes

I've never considered stand-up. Luckily I'm given great lines to say. I'm not sure how great my timing would be if I actually had to come up with my own jokes.

I just liked stand-up comedy so much. I used to memorize Bill Cosby albums and other people's albums, George Carlin, Flip Wilson.

It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.

It's also that comedians don't have the kind of narcissism that actors have. They're writers who perform their own material. It's more interesting. And they're sexy because they risk more. Stand-up comedians risk more than anyone.

With stand-up you've just got that one chance. Audiences can be quite fickle.

My stand-up act? I combine the fact that the world is a violent place with the fact that each person is responsible for the situation they are in.

Yeah, there were a few years in the early nineties where I really began to hate what was valued as funny and just sort of what was valued in stand-up, period.

When I was nine, we'd take a bus to the seaside. Coming back, we'd take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that.

I try to keep performing as much as possible - I just like to. I used to take huge gaps off between gigs, now I just like to do stand-up gigs as much as I can.

I was 18 when I started. I was hanging out with some friends and they asked if I had tried stand-up before. I hadn't, but I thought: 'What the hell?' So I went to an open mic night, and I liked it.

I get up around 7 a.m. That's very early for a stand-up comic. Then I'll have breakfast with my husband, the artist Al Ridenour, take my three dogs for a walk and commence with my work.

I always want to go back and do stand-up; I like the freedom.

If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.

No matter how popular you are as a stand-up - you can go out and fill a 10,000-seat arena and be smart and funny - it's delicate to host an awards show and know where your place is and know that it's not about you, that it's about the people who are nominated, and respect that, but at the same time have your moment to show them who you are.

I can do more than just stand-up comedy, and the only way I'll be able to show that is if I do it myself. Because nobody trusts that I can do it.

Also, as I've gotten older and more mature, I've become much more comfortable in my own skin. After 25 years of doing stand-up, that's reflected onstage.

Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines.

People ask me what I'm writing. They think I'm Sandra Tsing Loh. Or they ask about stand-up. 'No, that's Margaret Cho.' I really think there is this kind of glomming, that they think we are somehow all the same person.

I've been doing stand-up since I was 15 years old.

But long story short, I didn't start doing stand-up because I wanted to have a TV show or be an actor or even wanted to write sketch comedy. I got into stand-up because I love stand-up.

I hated stand-up.

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.

A stand-up comic is judged by every line. Singers get applause at the end of their song no matter how bad they are.

When I do stand-up, I'm basically doing a one-man show.

A lot of stand-up comedy guys, when they get a little famous, just give up their stand-up career, and it cancels out the thing that set them apart.

The first time I did stand-up was the summer I was 17.

Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me.

I think comics in New York are interested in being comics. And there're comics in L.A. who are touring comics, who are certainly more interested in stand-up, but a lot of L.A. stand-ups are really looking to do something else.

My stand-up act is very clean.

My ambition was to stop waiting tables. That was how I measured success: finally, I was able to stop waiting tables, and I was able to pay the rent, and that was by being a stand-up comic. Not a very good stand-up comic, but good enough to make a living.