It's easy to be silly in real life, but making stuff up onstage, that seemed hard. Better to be the funny person off-the-cuff in the room than to risk being unfunny onstage.
I'd really rather just be the anonymous Mr. Nobody who I always was up until I first went onstage. I liked that.
Some people love being onstage and really open up, and I'm sort of the opposite of that. I don't crave the spotlight. I'm still not comfortable even talking onstage.
I think that, for me, my favorite thing to do is perform standup onstage. Everything else I do is for the exposure to do more stand-up onstage, and for the money, and for the health insurance.
What I've realized in the last year, 80% of my act has already happened to me, and it's not until you retell the story at a party or to a friend or it comes up on the podcast that you, I don't know why I'm not doing that onstage!
Onstage I'm the one in control - I'm not at the mercy of how an editor chooses to put the scene together later. I can do things onstage that I would never do in real life. It's very freeing.
From offstage until the moment I walk onstage, I constantly tweak my talk show and 'Top Model', but at the same time, I often leave my private life by the wayside.
I don't really have any kind of rigorous or definite routine before I go onstage. I like to eat at least an hour or two before I go on. If I can't do that, I just wait until after. I try and drink lots of water before I go onstage.
My wife and I got to go onstage at a Flaming Lips concert at Webster Hall once. We dressed up like Scientology aliens and danced around. We had a shootout onstage with Santa Claus.
I've done stand-up since I was 18 years old, and I absolutely love it, but I used to go onstage, and the audience was my peers. Now I go onstage, and I could be their mother.
God would love to piece together the shattered fragments of your life. But He is waiting ... graciously waiting until the time is right. Until you are tired of the life you are living ... until you see it for what it really is. Until you are weary of coping ... of taking charge of your own life ... until you realize the mess you are making of it. Until you recognize your need for Him ... He's waiting.
My solo music - I get up onstage, I improvise and it's my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we're improvising together. Then it's not my music; it's our music.
I wanted to be an actor because I wanted to be onstage. I wanted to do musical theater, and from that I realized I was interested in plays. I never imagined myself on television. I was so lucky to be onstage my whole life.
I will say that, I, being a Jew, experience unease before I go onstage; and after I go onstage, and in general. But luckily the forty-five minutes to an hour that I'm onstage I usually forget everything else and I just press play.
The whole deal is when you walk onstage, you're up there bigger than life. People idolize you.
No one ever gets talker's block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say, and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.