If you like standup and decide that it's overtaking your life and want to hate it, watch 1,000 standup comedians who are trying to get on a TV show.
Podcasts feature comedians being as funny as they can be in a non-censored situation. It's really akin to standup in a way. When you go see a comedian in standup, that is the most pure, unadulterated form of their art.
When I became a standup comic, my hero, one of them, was Richard Pryor, and you know, I think that comedians, like, comedians talk about hacks, and what a hack is, is someone who does stuff that's not original.
I love standup comedians. I really do.
I'm a big fan of Louis CK - I think he's a master of standup.
Locked together in hatred. But I can't hate you Louis. Louis my love, I was mortal till you gave me your immortal kiss. You became my mother, and my father, and so I'm yours forever. But now it's time to end it, Louis. Now it's time to leave him.
A lot of female comedians will go up there in a sweatshirt and Converses, trying to dress themselves down, because it is sort of a boy's club. I'll go up in my heels. I like that people don't think I'll be funny. I'll take that on. I don't do standup comedy - I do standup and I do comedy, but I don't go up there and do jokes.
I feel like most standup comedians do it the way I did it, where you just go to open mics and cut your teeth. Sketch and improv - they take a lot of classes. It's not unusual, the way I did it. It's just that, with standup, no one knows how to start because there's no book for it; there's no place you can really go.
All of my life doing interviews, comedy has been my favorite thing, comedians are my favorite people.
This is something that the nimblest standup comedians learn, over time, to handle gracefully. They'll go between prepared material, then they'll respond to what's happening in the room and weave it back into the prepared material and so on.
If you're going to be a good standup, or a successful standup, or a standup who can work for money, you have to eliminate the possibility of dying quickly.
The demand for standup in the eighties was created by how easy it was to exploit 'comedians' and create very cheap television programming.
I think comedians get too much credit or too much criticism for the style of comedy they do, and they generally do the style of comedy that works for them. [...] There's no kind of shrewd calculation going into the type of standup we all do. It's like David Cross is supposed to be doing the David Cross' type of standup.
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.'
I'm a standup comedian who gets to act. I'm never going to not do standup. I love doing it and when I go through periods where I'm doing a lot of acting work, I still do standup.
It's weird because standup can be like therapy. Comedians can't be satisfied with just having fun with our friends. We've got to figure out a way to do it on stage.