A Quote by Judah Friedlander

In Manhattan, I often do two or three or more shows a night, so I'm always working on new material. — © Judah Friedlander
In Manhattan, I often do two or three or more shows a night, so I'm always working on new material.
If I have a weakness, it's probably ice cream. That's where I get lax, sloppy. I'll sneak into the refrigerator at night and take two or three bites and put it back. Butter pecan. Only two or three bites, but it shows.
Four things to think about. 1. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 2. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred. 3. Keep three chairs in your house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. 4. To preserve your relationship to nature, make your life more moral, more pure, more innocent.
I work, to this day, from morning to night, seven days a week. I'm always working two, three years ahead of my own timeline; I'm a workaholic.
I did always want to write. And then, when I left New York, where I was working very steadily in the theater - I had done three Broadway shows in a row and was a bit burnt out - I moved out to L.A. and I was not working very much. I came in cold and I'd work for a week, but then I'd have a month or two off. I thought, "I'm going to go crazy unless I actually do write." Like a lot of things in life, it was a situation that came about by circumstances.
The main issue was deciding what to play: Should it be old Ramones material or new material? I had about three albums worth of new material, but I knew that people would rather hear the Ramones songs.
Everyone who wants to make it in comedy goes to L.A., so a million comedians fight for time on three stages. If you get in there in New York, you're working eight times a night sometimes. Who's going to be funny, the guy who works once a week, or the guy working eight times a night?
Well, I think that the most exciting stage of any tour is getting the tour together. Because when new material works, there is no other feeling like that. It's just brilliant. And for the first half of the tour, you're still often finding the extra stuff in that material. You're exploring it every night.
For me, Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' defines New York. Both New York and Manhattan Island should be in black in white! I always hear the soundtrack of Gershwin in my head every time I go over the Queensboro Bridge, or come in from JFK because of it!
I go on at least 2-3 auditions a week in the pursuit of more work. So I'm constantly working on material and constantly honing and trying to perfect a craft that is never perfectible - it's always new, and it's always different. It's always a work in progress.
I run the material, always with two people, sometimes three. We all see things so differently, so to get a couple of people's perspectives on what I'm doing and the material itself is insanely helpful for honing in on what to take into the audition room.
I extract what I consider the best material from different sources. But often the material I perform comes from a very strange location in history, which are minstrel shows.
For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.
Night after night in the '50s, I traveled all over New York City. The promoter had 10 acts, and the winner each night would get five dollars; second place would get three dollars, and third place would get two dollars. He always put the best acts on last so the people wouldn't walk out, and the worst acts went on first. He always put me on first.
In 1964, when we first arrived in New York City, I remember vividly seeing the skyline of Manhattan, and our first proposal of 1964 was to wrap two lower Manhattan buildings. We never got permission.
I don't think I've been bored, ever. I've always been working on two or three things at a time; whether it was in the early days, or whatever, I was always working on something.
Someone did a study of the three most-often-heard phrases in New York City. One is "Hey taxi." Two is "What train do I take to get to Bloomingdales?" And three is "Don't worry, it's only a flesh wound.
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