A Quote by W. Kamau Bell
You pretty much have to be bad at it [stand-up] for several years to get good at it, so there's no avoiding embarrassing yourself.
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I always get a little bit pissed off when stand-up comedy is not recognised as being as good a craft as being an actor. We give Oscars to people and it's like, 'Aw, this person is the greatest person on earth', but being an actor is pretty easy in comparison to stand-up comedy. It's no surprise that several stand-up comics have gone on to become great actors. I don't know any great actors that have gone on to become great stand-up comics.
Getting knocked out in your underwear in the Octagon is pretty embarrassing, but people are like, 'The guy he's fighting is really, really good, and he is a UFC fighter, so he can still beat up 99 percent of the world,' so it's not that embarrassing.
Conclusions are based in time. We live in time. So any definition of success is bound up with time. With other things you can say, "Can I yo-yo? Can I juggle?" Usually you have a pretty small window in which to get your answer. Stand-up is different. You can't do stand-up for one night and say, "Am I a funny stand-up comedian?" In two months or two years you'll start to realize it.
Beauty is embarrassing for three reasons. When we see something beautiful it calls up raw, naked emotion and that's an embarrassing situation to be in. Number two... People that are born beautiful like supermodels act like entitled a**holes. It makes you embarrassed just to see 'em. They handle beauty embarrassingly. Number three... Artists are people who create beauty. That's the bottom line. It would be really embarrassing to introduce yourself as somebody who makes beauty. So that's just three of several reasons why I think beauty is embarrassing.
My dad was pretty strict. We didn't even get to watch any of his movies until I was, like, 17 years old. I didn't even see his stand-up, really, until I started doing stand-up, and that was when I was 22. So he's pretty strict. We had curfews until I was 17... he didn't play around.
I'm super happy to say that it's not that hard to write bad stand-up. I guess the trick is to write bad stand-up that sounds like you're trying to be good.
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.
Listen, after almost twenty years of call-in radio, I can tell you that the main thrust of too many lives is an overemphasis on feeling good instead of doing good. Being admired and respected by the self and others has taken a back seat to feeling good, or, at least, avoiding feeling bad. And, oh boy, the excuses some of you can come up with for doing so!
If you burn yourself out in two years of intense selfless giving, what good is that if you could have given 20 years? Set yourself up well. Get the things you want - God exists in the material and in the spiritual.
Embarrassed journalists ask me embarrassing questions, and they get embarrassing answers, and then hand out embarrassing stories to the embarrassing editors, who put them to the front pages of newspapers. When is this going to end?
Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic - you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.
For me any moment in front of a crowd is embarrassing, because I can't stand being in front of people. I'm probably one of the worst public speakers. I try to avoid it, but there are times when it's just too rude not to do it. But there really isn't a moment that's not embarrassing for me if I'm going to stand up in front of a crowd.
All of human history is about the going from sudden fat years to the sudden lean years. We've always had good times and bad, and we've had ways of managing the bad times. We have ways of insulating ourselves, making ourselves less sensitive for the bad times by having things like grain stores, for example. Pretty much every civilization that's lasted for any reasonable length of time has some food management principles behind it. But what's been happening over the past thirty years is it's failed - the insurance policy.
Somebody's gotta stand up and say pubic hair is good, murder is bad. Sex is good, violence is bad.
My experiences are universal. I'm not doing anything embarrassing - to me what would be embarrassing is to talk about minutia. It would be embarrassing to get up there and not say anything.
A lot of stand-up comedy is embarrassing: too many idiots doing it in orange neckties against brick walls. I find most sitcoms embarrassing, too, because they seem so forced.
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