A Quote by Retta

All the people I looked up to - Roseanne, Tim Allen, and Jerry Seinfeld - were stand-up comedians who used humor to get TV shows. I'm on TV now, and I'm working towards getting my own show.
Being a stand-up comic, this isn't a stepping-stone for me; it's what I do, and this is what I'm always going to do. And even if I do a TV show, the only reasons to do a TV show is to get more people to know me to come out to my stand-up shows.
When you are working on a TV show or series, you just get into the routine. You get used to getting up early. It takes a few days, but once you are up and running, you get used to going home late, and it becomes this very repetitive cycle.
The thing is, with doing our TV show 'Strictly,' and 'Stand Up For Cancer' and any shows I do for TV, it's always so positive.
TV and film for me are not as exciting as the live stand-up show and getting the immediate reaction of the crowd. TV is a lot of hurry up and wait for your shot and less immediate reaction from people.
I watch a TV show called 'Shark Tank.' It's one of my favorite TV shows. It's basically self-made millionaires who have either come up with their own business or clothing... I came up with the idea of designing clothes.
I knew I wanted to be in comedy but the path of least resistance was doing stand-up in folk music clubs where I could get on stage. I guess you could get up no matter how bad you were and you didn't have to audition. You just got up. Everything else required an audition and if you auditioned for a TV show, you would stand in line with a hundred other people. But at the clubs, it was okay just to get up, so that's why I started in stand-up.
Why are we casting all these stand-up comedians to do 'Breaking Bad,' one of the most dramatic TV shows ever?
With the stand-up comic on TV, whether it's Seinfeld or Cosby or Roseanne, more important than their knowledge of how to tell a joke is their knowledge of themselves, or the persona they've created as themselves. So that when you're in a room with writers, you can say, 'Guys, that's a funny line, but I wouldn't say it.'
In the stand-up comedy top, there's room for everyone - if you're good, there's room for everyone. You'll put on your own show - no one casts you. You cast your own show as a stand-up comedian. When you get good at stand-up comedy you book a theater and if people show up, people show up. If people don't show up, people don't show up. You don't have a director or a casting agent or anybody saying if you're good enough - the audience will decide.
Growing up, I remember watching TV, and I didn't see a lot of people who looked like me, especially someone who passed as a glamorous model on a mainstream TV show.
We have a lot of American TV in Australia. I grew up watching 'Seinfeld,' 'The Simpsons' and those prime time TV shows over the years that feature grown-ups and high school kids. We had a saturation of American voices.
I was always the class clown; I made my family laugh, and that was when I was always happiest. I grew up listening to stand-up comedians' albums and watching them on TV, on 'The Tonight Show' and Letterman.
When I used to watch comedians with my dad, he laid it all out for me. He wanted to be a comedian himself, and he was so funny. We'd watch stand-up on TV, and he'd tell me the subtext of what they were saying.
There are terrific TV shows now. This is a golden age for TV humor, I think. There's an actual market there. Of course, I have no idea how you'd break in, but there must be a way. They have all these shows and they need jokes and somebody is writing them.
You're used to a TV show, and TV is just made for TV shows. It's not made for live events.So anyways, I was resistant to it, but I did it anyway.
Jerry Seinfeld, he was doing Letterman show all the time, so he kind of had an excuse, that people know the jokes already. He didn't have time to do stand-up. A guy like me, I have no excuses.
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