As long as you have your own apartment and you can pretty much make rent for the next year, you're golden!
Ari Shaffir
You just gotta record stuff and move on and make new material. Painters don't wait until they're in some specific gallery before they move on to the next painting.
I think you're a comedian as soon as you start. I don't think there's a moment where you become a full comic.
Early on, I had a girlfriend come see me, and she was like, 'Yeah, it was good, but you were funny at a dining hall at the University of Maryland.' That's when I realized I was contrived. I was reciting jokes. So I really worked on - no matter what - sounding like I was just talking to the people.
I get lost a lot.
I'm pretty much only friends with comedians.
My father said that I was lower than a dog, because even a dog believes in God.
Sometimes I start off shows by explaining to people that it's just a bunch of stories - I always say 'It's like standup, just less funny.'
I have a running daydream about winning an Oscar and giving my speech about how ridiculous it is to rank art. And then I'd call them all sycophants and leave the statue at the podium as I walked away.
I got an award for Most Improved Player for volleyball in tenth grade that I cared about a lot.
Being Orthodox Jewish is kind of like being raised on like network sitcoms.
I want to do a travel book.
I never had good grades until I dropped out of religion. And then suddenly, my grades went up.
I used to get a lot of death threats. After a while I realized that no one's gonna do anything or they would've.
I lived with my parents until I was 25.
When Joe Rogan started his podcasts he'd have me, Joe Diaz, and all our friends help him for the first few. And I told him 'Dude, no one will listen to audio that's over an hour long. You've got to end it at 59:59 or less.' And I was way wrong.
Stage fright is a real thing. It's debilitating to some people.
To me, every time it goes badly I see it as a good thing - because that means I'm one step closer to where I want to be.
I don't vote and I don't follow who's trying to rule us. The revolution is coming. Until then, I'll just watch 'Game of Thrones.'
My CD, my first release, was at the Comedy Works in Denver, one of the best clubs in the country.
At The Comedy Store, night after night, the crowds are fuller. It used to be Tuesday at 9 you'd have to start with six people. Now you come in on Tuesdays and it's 100-plus people and you're like, 'Really? On a Tuesday?'
Once I started getting more successful, I just stopped caring completely - 'I'll just do exactly what I want. It doesn't matter.'
When people tell me to do a clean show, I'm like, 'Guys, I don't even understand your thoughts anymore.' What, you can't say a curse word? Nobody thinks that way!
Bill Burr, Freddy Soto, Joe Rogan, Tom Segura… those people influenced me a lot more than any of the older guys like Richard Pryor.
I'm like an overgrown child! I don't know how to do anything!
I was on the outside of the industry. So I started a podcast early in the podcast boom and that caught on a little. I made an album that went to No. 1 on the iTunes charts. I made my own special. I started my own storytelling show.
If I focus solely on developing new material, then I can get a new 45 minute to an hour in about six months. Then I'll work on it and work on it and can make it killer within another six months or so.
Marc Maron yells at people. I have a memory of him yelling at Jonah Ray from offstage about something he was saying, just fun stuff.
One thing I hate in ethnic comedy is giving the audience the opportunity to laugh in a racist way at a thing. A lot of times dwarf comedians will do that, Arab comics, and gay comics will do it; everyone is laughing, but they're not laughing at the joke, they're laughing at this crazy character.
Everyone in L.A. talks about getting an agent or a manager in terms of getting on a sitcom or getting on a movie or doing something else.
Figure out a way to get back onstage because once you do it a few times you'll get over it. Unless it's like a clinical thing. I don't know about clinical like stage fright, that might be worse than what I'm talking about. But if it's normal stage fright get over it.
Leonard Cohen kept his Jew name. He's so cool. It's too bad he died.
I'm a cultural Jew, I was raised with it, so I'm still into it, like gefilte fish with kugel.
Being Jewish is a culture and a religion; we have food, music, and land specific to us.
Get out of people's way and let them be who they are. If they make a mistake, fine, that's on them.
I grew up so conservative. I grew up as an orthodox Jew.
The only threat is a growing pushback from militant liberals who seek to destroy free expression as they look to limit the speech of anyone who has feelings they find objectionable. It makes comics tentative to push boundaries and freely talk about the thoughts in their heads. That part is terrible for development.
The Comedy Store is my home!
The worst is when you bomb and when you bomb in front of someone you're trying to impress. That's the worst.
No one's telling Tarantino what to do. You might like it or you might not like it, but the reality is he's getting his own vision out there.
Very rarely are you going to see a story about a comic winning a fight. Yeah we're all degenerates in some way and we're all awful people, so we just show our weaknesses.
That anonymity that comes with talking in front of a crowd of people you've never met allows you to reveal anything, because you don't really have to associate with any one of them.
Laughs, just laughs. It's the only motivation of a comic.
I worked for the Comedy Store as an employee trying to become a paid regular. I had this dream of achieving a half hour special on TV.
It's all about the art. It's not about getting on TV or not getting on TV.
The fact that I didn't believe in God was something that I just didn't consider. And then when I did, it was like, 'Oh yeah, I'm out.'
The biggest thing I lost when I left religion was that sense of community and the culture. It was an unexpected kind of free-falling. When I was in it, I didn't understand how much the community was a part of my life.
I'm not as much a fan of the venues as I am the comics who inhabit them. I don't care if it's a bomb shelter, a bus, or a theater, if I'm watching somebody who makes me laugh, I'm down.
I genuinely like haggis. Everybody told me I was supposed to hate it, but I really did enjoy it.
I'm a bit of an introvert, so after talking for an hour and then shaking hands and taking pictures with the people who came out, I kind of need to be alone for a bit to get away from all stimuli.
