Lewis Black taught me stand-up.
The Master of Ceremonies in 'Bridge and Tunnel' is a wonderful man, if I do say so myself. I talk about all the characters in the third person. But, he is a really congenial... just a good stand-up guy, who happens to be Pakistani-American. He's been here for years.
The best part about stand-up is that you control everything. Period.
I didn't really like the aloneness of doing stand-up. The comedians by nature weren't very - I mean, they were sociable, but they hung out in cliques, and it's very hard to get accepted; lots of competition.
Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting.
I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist.
One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.
I hated stand-up.
I gravitated toward stand-up because there's no overhead. I mean, literally, there's no overhead: Often, you're outdoors performing in front of groups of people.
A stand-up comedian faces the audiences and gets their immediate feedback. I hide behind the comic strip, and unless people write to me, I don't know what they think.
WWE has no issues with my stand-up. I do not miss work for any reason and will continue to work around my schedule because I'm a professional and do not allow complacency or laziness.
I feel I've always got to keep my stand-up because I never want to lose it.
I think a lot comes from having the experience of doing stand-up comedy. It allows you to figure out the psychology of an audience; what things are funny and not.
I'm lucky enough to have two different platforms to perform on - I do stand-up comedy, and I have 'SNL.' That's where I make my most controversial statements because I can explain myself and I'm in control of the microphone, as opposed to Twitter, where it's in the hands of the reader.
I kept being asked by corporations to do corporate gigs. And I said, 'I don't have anything. I'm not a stand-up. You want me to come sing show tunes for you? I don't think so.'
I don't have any type of sketch-comedy or stand-up background.
I've yet to write a stand-up show that isn't autobiographical.
I started doing stand-up in college.
I'm a comedian, for God's sake. Viewers shouldn't trust me. And you know what? They're hip enough to know they shouldn't trust me. I'm just doing stand-up comedy.
I keep doing stand-up because the world needs laughter - there's always something happening in the country and in the world. That's why I wanted to become an entertainer: to help people forget about their problems for a little while.
When I do stand-up shows at colleges, girls will talk to me after the show, and that always feels good. I like talking to them.
Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.
As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.
I never knew if I would get my own show, but I knew I loved stand-up.
If you see me doing a new stand-up special, it probably means I've been out of work for a while.
Georgia was a great place to live, but I wanted to get out because I knew the opportunities for what I was doing - stand-up comedy and eventually acting - were in Los Angeles.
I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn't love them.
I have this very abstract idea in my head. I wouldn't even want to call it stand-up, because stand-up conjures in one's mind a comedian with a microphone standing onstage under a spotlight telling jokes to an audience. The direction I'm going in is eventually, you won't know if it's a joke or not.
I don't come from a comedy background or a stand-up background, but I think that sometimes there's a misconception that an actor who works primarily in comedy is a comedian. There's nothing wrong with being a comedian, but I'm absolutely not that. I can't think of anything more terrifying than doing stand-up!
I did a 'Last Comic Standing' audition in 2006, where you're just performing for three people in a comedy club, in a big comedy club, and I remember them cutting me off, asking about my name in the middle of one of my jokes. Yeah, it's just real weird when you're doing stand-up in that type of sterile, unnatural setting.
Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines.
Health-wise, I couldn't have said what my life expectancy would've been if I'd just carried on doing solid blocks of stand-up.
I spent 25 years as a stand-up comedian.
When I hit my 20s, I struggled to make it. I got married at 19, and my daughter, Je'Niece, was born a year later. I worked blue collar jobs during the day and comedy clubs at night, and I was earning about $25 a year doing stand-up.
But long story short, I didn't start doing stand-up because I wanted to have a TV show or be an actor or even wanted to write sketch comedy. I got into stand-up because I love stand-up.
Stand-up is my heart and now I get a chance to do that and the music altogether. That's going to be great. I'm trying to be the Sammy Davis Jr. of 2005. I'm planning on going out with Cedric the Entertainer because he's got that musical bone, too.
