A Quote by Retta
I started when Chris Rock did 'Bigger & Blacker.' I used to watch that before I went onstage as inspiration to get hype, but I noticed I started taking on his cadence and talking like him. I was also doing the New York-style comedy thing, which was angry and annoyed. I was creating a persona instead of trying to embrace my own.
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I'm from New York, and I started in New York, which I think is a huge advantage because I wasn't overwhelmed by the city. I understood the city. All of the distractions that could come with somebody that started comedy in New York didn't really happen for me.
I initially started making videos about my hair because I was struggling to style it and didn't know where to find help. Similarly, I started creating comedy content and doing characters and talking about things that were important to me because I didn't find a place to do that in the career that I wanted as an actress.
It's kind of too movie-like to say, "When I started climbing, I knew I wanted to climb Everest some day." Instead, I just started rock climbing as a kid, when I was 16, and then I started teaching and a buddy of mine started taking me out.
I'm sure when alternative comedy started, before which - Billy Connolly aside - standup was essentially a person being racist and sexist onstage, there was also the sense that this was the death of comedy. But it's just progress.
When I was 16, I started to spend a lot of time in Soho and downtown New York and noticed everyone's style and the eclectic things people would wear. And that's when I started to experiment with things like my lipstick and mixing different kinds of pieces and, of course, my hair color.
I think I can work anywhere, but you don't get the same kind of inspiration everywhere. New York theater has become a big inspiration for me. I only started writing for the stage myself because I like to see the good, mostly off-Broadway plays in New York.
I first did stand-up when I was 17, and then I passed out fliers for a comedy club (in New York City) and I got onstage whenever I could. And musical theater went out the window as soon as I started doing stand-up.
I started doing comedy just as myself, because I thought, "This is what's expected, you're meant to tell stories and do observations." And then I started to realize that I wanted to mix it up a bit, so I started to doing songs, and I had a little keyboard onstage and would bring in little props. Then I thought about the idea of talking about a character and becoming the character onstage. So, it sort of morphed into being stand-up that was more character based, and I found that's the stuff I got the better reaction from and was more exciting for me.
I was so used to doing old blues licks with the first three fingers. When I started using my pinky and finding more spread things, that's when I started getting my own style.
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.
Before I started doing '30 Rock', I did about 25 movies. I'd always been doing stand-up every night, and then I would do, like, two to four movies a year. So I really liked doing that, and I want to get back to that, but because of the time commitment to '30 Rock', there's not much time to do that stuff.
When I first started at Bridgend, I'd see the amount of work Rob Howley put in on his own after the team had all gone home. He was doing ridiculous amounts. So I started training like him. Always on my own.
Comedy is really my passion. I started out way before television doing sketch comedy with other women. Very much along the lines of, at the time it was 'Sensible Footwear', but now it's 'Smack The Pony', 'French And Saunders', that kind of thing. That's how I started out.
When I started to take literature and poetry classes, I just started to get inspired by these new incredible works of art that I had never seen or heard of before. I wrote a lot of bad high-school poetry, just like pretty much everyone did, I think, at some point. For me, the inspiration never really stopped.
I loved working with Malcolm [McDowell]. He's been such an important person in my life. I mean, not just as someone I was married to, which is huge, and the father of my children, which is even bigger, but also as a friend and an inspiration and somebody who probably helped to fuel something that all my reading as a child had already started, which was a love of England and the world of the theater over there, which I became involved with through him and probably because of him.
I did skit comedy online for many years, beginning around 2001. Around 2006 I started watching a lot of food television and got re-interested in food. I come from a very food-obsessed family. But I also wanted to do my own thing, which was the comedy.
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