A Quote by Don Rickles
To this day, to this very day, except for television, I've never had a writer. Anything I've ever done on the stage, happened on the stage and I developed it from there. It started doing impressions and jokes - which I did very poorly. To this day I can't tell a joke. That sounds nuts, but it's true. I exaggerate it and it becomes a joke. Everything I've ever done I've done out on the stage and it became a performance over many many years.
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I don't think I've ever died on stage. I've had jokes that died on stage. I've told a joke and absolutely nothing. They didn't know it was the end of the joke.
I'd love to do Broadway some day. Before I started doing television I was just a primarily a stage actor, but I haven't done it in a while.
In 2006, when doing a live stage show in Ireland, I tried for the first time to instantly induct a subject on stage, something I had never done before, nor did I know if it would ever work. The result almost cost me my career; the man I grabbed and instantly inducted went out cold and fell to the floor.
In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.
Now, I want to explain something to you guys. I don't have an ending joke, because I don't tell jokes. I tell real-life stories and make them funny. So, I'm not like the average comedian. They have an ending joke; they always holler Peace! I'm out of here, and walk off stage. So, basically, when I get through performing on stage, I just walk off.
I've never been able to tell jokes. In the beginning of my career I did impressions and jokes like any other comedian, but I was never very successful because I did it poorly. So I started to talk to the audience and started talking about the atmosphere around me and started to become angry, not in a mean-spirited way, but in a fun way - and my attitude developed from there.
I went up on stage, and said, "Why did the chicken cross the road? To check out the chicks." I was a genius at 10. Try telling that at 21, and you look hacky and stupid. That was the only joke I've ever told. Everything since has been character voices, doing impressions or just telling stories.
I feel like you can share as many jokes as you want to because no joke you do on Twitter is ever gonna be so big on Twitter, for the most part, that you can't say it on stage that same night.
With 'Tron,' we had so many crew members around and a stage full of special effects people that know exactly what has to be done in the situations. You're on a stage in sets the whole time.
Everything I do on stage, I made up in saloons. I started doing it in front of people, and that became my performance. I never had writers.
I've done a lot of stage in my life, but I never had to dominate a stage for three hours.
Performing on stage is such a buzz. I've done stupid things such as jump off a building, but I'd never experienced adrenalin like I did on stage.
The first joke I ever told on stage was a golf joke.
I live on a boat two months out of the year, and if I did not have that then I don't know how I'd be able to handle all this.... I am a very intense person on stage. I have to remember why I am there, what I am doing. You can spend all day backstage preparing for the show and lose sight of why you are doing this. Off stage, I am a very simple kind of guy. I live my life in flip-flops.
I was always pretty broad. I've had a couple bad experiences. One time, I showed up late for a gig in Brooklyn at an Italian restaurant. I ran on stage, did my show, and then some guy in the audience threatened to kill me because he didn't like my joke. Instead of talking to him, I just ran off stage. And then, because I was late, the owner of the restaurant threatened to kill me. And I was 19 years old and so scared that I almost started crying. But, I've done every gig you can imagine, in every state.
I started on television. I had five years of network television before I ever got up on a stage. The first thing I ever did was in 1967. This guy Bill Keene had a little talk show at noon, and Gary Owens took over for a week. He knew about this dummy bit I used to do, this ventriloquist thing, and I was on 'Keene at Noon.'
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