You don't need to be stable to be a stand-up comedian.
I'm a very observational type of comedian that points out everyday absurdities.
I pushed against doing a podcast for so long. I'm a very late comer to the podcast game. But you're responsibility as a comedian is to get your viewpoints out into the world, and we have a lot more avenues to do that. So it's a lot more opportunity, but really have to work all the time.
I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor, and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.
Racial humor was about 35% of my act when I first started. But I realized that it was a crutch. What brought it home was when another comedian said to me, 'If you changed color tomorrow, you wouldn't have any material.' He meant it as a put-down, but I took it as a challenge.
The nice thing about anger is that, as an emotion, it's strong enough to unplug me from the comedian's mind for a minute and just be a frustrated member of the citizenry.
When you're leading Marines, you don't screw around, so the comedy is limited in uniform. And when you're a comedian, you can't be heavy handed and come across with tales of gore or material that people won't understand, so I try to keep them separate.
Podcasts feature comedians being as funny as they can be in a non-censored situation. It's really akin to standup in a way. When you go see a comedian in standup, that is the most pure, unadulterated form of their art.
You know, I'm a comedian the same as Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. We all came up the same way. The three of us have interest in politics; I call us fundits, we're fundits! We're not pundits!
I don't perceive my role as a newsman at all. I'm a comedian from stem to stern. You can cut me open and count the rings of jokes.
Music is very similar to comedy: It's all about texture, timing, context, vocabulary, performance. When someone's onstage doing a solo, essentially it's the same thing as what a comedian does. They're in the moment. They're listening.
The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn't have that kind of personality, and it's a terrifying thing to say.
I'm a physical comedian, and I don't get to show it off very often.
There isn't a comedian in the world that hasn't bombed.
To ask a pratfall comedian, a dishes-in-the-face comic like me, to lay back and bring none of that stuff to the script because it doesn't call for it? That's tough.
As a comedian, you see all parts of the country because you play there.
Every day I do one or two podcasts that 92 percent of people never will hear. I'm constantly producing, constantly making jokes for Twitter. There's a lot of pressure there. On the flip side, I think having to produce like that makes you a better comedian.
You have two choices, two paths to take as a comedian. You can tackle the difficult subjects and be harsh about it, be brash, be abrasive. But adding hatred to racism is not going to help everybody. So I like to have fun around it.
When I'm going to see a comedian, I don't want to see them hold back, and when I'm reading a book, I don't want to hear an abridged version.
As a comedian, I don't know if they're laughing because it's funny or if they're laughing at me because I'm not funny. And I'm thinking, 'Who cares? They're laughing.' If you go on stage, and they're laughing at you full-on for 60 minutes? You know, whatever puts them in the seats.
I do films which get me out of my comedian routine so that I don't get bored being a stand-up comedian. And with films, it's here today, gone tomorrow. So stand-up comedy is here to stay for me.
When they put me in jail, that's when they turned me into an activist. Up until the time I went to jail, I was just a comedian.
I am a standup comedian who has performed comedy in the Middle East in front of thousands of Muslims. And believe it or not, they laughed at plenty, especially when we poked fun at local culture. The Lebanese loved it when you would make fun of their driving and how, in Lebanon, a red light is just a suggestion to stop.
What happened to me is I gained a little weight so I could be more accessible to people. They're not like, 'Oh my God, he's, like, a male model comedian; yuck, ugh.' It's like, 'Oh, he's a little squishy; He's like me. He's accessible.' And girls are like, 'Look how cuddly he is. I just want to cuddle up in his neck fat and go to sleep.'
I am pleased to say that I am not a tortured comedian - I laugh a lot. My twenties weren't particularly happy, but it's the same for a lot of people. In your thirties, you realise that your life and your worries are really insignificant, and you have to force yourself to be more positive and take each day as a gift.
It really helps a comedian to be an outsider.
I was inspired by people telling me I should be a comedian. I tried it and had a really good first set, so I was like, 'OK, I'll do this forever'.
My roots were in acting. That's all I wanted to be. Even though my father was a radio comedian, it wasn't cool to say, at a young age, 'I want to be a comedian.'
The whole thing for me is that I did 'Full House' and 'America's Funniest Home Videos,' and I look like a dentist, and I'm a dad. Being known as a dirty comedian turned into this weird thing. It's people's image of me.
I definitely talk about my love of metal to audiences, and I sort of realized it was always natural and never, 'Well, I'm going to be the heavy-metal comedian.'
Really, to me, a really good evening would be a comedian, followed by a band, followed by a really good DJ.
As a comedian, I think you need to keep things real.
I think I'm just a comedian who's a pretty good con man, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
I mean, sometimes... a comedian becomes an actor, and they just don't deliver, because the bottom line of comedy is to be funny, and the bottom line of acting is to be truthful, and they get that mixed up sometimes, or don't even notice that that's the thing.
If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned laughter is cheating.
There's something about being a comedian that means you have to not be scared of failing because failing is part of the process.