/images/quoteimage/bo-burnham-fb-97339.jpg

Comedy doesn't really matter that much; I know that. I treat it like an adult - I don't treat it like a child or a god, which some people do. This might just be in America, but 'stand-up comedy' is something very particular that I don't particularly relate to.

Bo Burnham

/images/quoteimage/adam-savage-7486.jpg

New York State is giant and has some of the most beautiful landscape on the Eastern seaboard. There is so much history in New York State, from the Erie Canal to the Catskills, the birth of American stand-up comedy.

History Easter York

/images/quoteimage/alessandra-torresani-20428.jpg

I was a very special child. I did stand-up comedy. I did it all. My family didn't understand. 'Aren't you tired?' I'm like, 'No.' I'm like an insomniac, I hardly sleep, I'm always on the move.

Alessandra Torresani

Family You Ways

/images/quoteimage/alexandra-petri-25151.jpg

Although no one explicitly wants a president who could have a reliable fall back career in stand-up comedy, everyone shudders at the thought of a Rutherford B. Hayes or John Kerry.

Alexandra Petri

/images/quoteimage/ali-wong-27181.jpg

I liked that improv and sketch comedy were collaborative, but you really depended on other people and a stage to perform. With stand-up comedy, I liked that you had no one else to blame and depend on.

/images/quoteimage/ali-wong-27210.jpg

The word 'supportive' has no place in stand-up comedy. I hate when people are like, 'Support female comedy.' That's not a real genre of comedy. I think if you have true respect for women as three-dimensional creators who are innovative, you wouldn't group them together like that.

Women Respect Men

/images/quoteimage/ali-wong-27211.jpg

Stand-up comedy is something that you have to strive to do, multiple times a night, every night, to be good.

/images/quoteimage/ali-wong-27222.jpg

I have this fantasy of relaxing and doing nothing. But I'm obviously very passionate about stand-up comedy. I mean, I keep doing it. So I must be really into it.

/images/quoteimage/amanda-bynes-32514.jpg

I never wanted to be a model. I never wanted to be a serious actress. I started off doing comedy. I did a stand-up comedy camp at the Laugh Factory, and I started out on Nickelodeon.

Art Wanted Want

/images/quoteimage/anh-do-48881.jpg

Stand-up comedy is a really lonely profession: you 'perform for 2000 people, then you go to a hotel room by yourself and stare at a wall.

Yourself Yours Your

/images/quoteimage/anjelah-johnson-49548.jpg

Nobody wanted to help me get my start, not to mention it's tough being a female in a man's world of stand-up comedy. It's a very competitive world, and it was a challenge to find my own voice, stick to my guns.

Anjelah Johnson

/images/quoteimage/ardal-ohanlon-60810.jpg

Getting up in front of the toughest crowds, you know, playing pubs in South Armagh - where people didn't necessarily even know what stand-up comedy was - you had to force yourself to do it. It went against every instinct in your body, but you did it anyway.

Yourself Yours Your Body

/images/quoteimage/aziz-ansari-71927.jpg

Stand-up comedy is a raunchy profession.

/images/quoteimage/bill-burr-89814.jpg

You know, it wasn't even that I'm a funny guy, I just loved stand-up comedy and I wanted to do it. It was one of the few things in my life that I knew I was going to be able to do, and I also felt as though I'd be able to do it the way I wanted to do it.

Love Life Funny

/images/quoteimage/bo-burnham-97339.jpg

Comedy doesn't really matter that much; I know that. I treat it like an adult - I don't treat it like a child or a god, which some people do. This might just be in America, but 'stand-up comedy' is something very particular that I don't particularly relate to.

/images/quoteimage/bob-mortimer-98803.jpg

I'm not a fan of stand-up comedy, personally. But some of them are incredibly skilled.

/images/quoteimage/bobcat-goldthwait-100999.jpg

I started doing stand-up when I was 15 and doing Letterman when I was 20. So I've been doing stand-up comedy and clubs for over 30 years. That's a long time.

Bobcat Goldthwait

/images/quoteimage/brett-gelman-107698.jpg

At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is like acting when the audience are the other characters that I'm acting with.

/images/quoteimage/brion-james-111753.jpg

You know, stand-up comedy is where I pretty much started out.

/images/quoteimage/bryan-callen-114898.jpg

Stand-up comedy is all you. It's your show, it's your game. You control every aspect of it - of that experience and that expression. There's really nothing quite as satisfying.

Experience Your You

/images/quoteimage/catherine-tate-129794.jpg

I went from an unemployed actor's life to doing stand-up comedy, and that was fortuitous. It's not the usual way the crow flies, going from being in a TV sketch show to playing one of Shakespeare's finest characters, but, hey, that's the way it has happened.

As far as stand-up comedy, I got into the business later than most, yeah.

If the 'Chappelle's Show' had stayed on, I seriously doubt I would have developed this fast as a stand-up comedian. I probably would never have taken stand-up comedy really seriously.

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 think it's a very easy thing to make people laugh, especially with a script, and then you've just got to dress up. That's also the idea of comedy in Bollywood. But in stand-up comedy, there's a man with just some content trying to make everyone laugh.

I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.

I think that people who do enjoy my stand-up comedy and the people who get it and the people who are taken in by it, they see that I'm a guy that has love of the game.

When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.

I did stand-up comedy for seventeen years. I need to explore other things.

I can do more than just stand-up comedy, and the only way I'll be able to show that is if I do it myself. Because nobody trusts that I can do it.

I'm a stand-up comic. Anything else I do besides that is a plus, but stand-up comedy is what I do, it's what I've been doing and it's what I'm going to keep doing.

Stand-up comedy and poverty. Those were my two main endeavors.

The thing about stand-ups is you can't really get good unless you're failing in front of a large number of people. That makes stand-up comedy unique: you need a tremendous amount of reserve within you to take the rejection from the audience, and without it, you can't do anything.

David Steinberg

When you're a stand-up, you play in front of 600 people, and it's all about timing. I could never do stand-up comedy; it would be way too hard for me.

Ultimately, I just decided stand-up comedy is a huge commitment, and if you want to be the best, you have to give it one hundred per cent.

I don't like doing things by halves, and I realised you can't do stand-up comedy part-time.

Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.

I guess you get pigeon-holed in Hollywood, but I'm ok with that because I've been able to do a lot. I started in the theater, then I went to stand-up comedy, and then when I went into the movies to do comedy and drama and big movies and small movies.

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.

How I've fed my kids over the years is by doing stand-up comedy in clubs.

Dominic Holland

Stand-up comedy is not for the faint-hearted or the thin-skinned.

Dominic Holland

I just liked stand-up comedy so much. I used to memorize Bill Cosby albums and other people's albums, George Carlin, Flip Wilson.

Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me. Every night I had a live audience of 25,000 people to win over. My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.

Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me.

I play these sort of comical instruments I invented, like the electric rake and the electric plunger. I do a lot of almost stand-up comedy material. Just the juxtaposition of the different styles in itself sometimes is funny. Like, I do sort of an acoustic version of 'Purple Haze' that has some bluegrass licks in it.

Eugene Chadbourne

But sometimes it's good to dare yourself to do the unthinkable. And rather than stand in front of an audience with no clothes on, I decided to have a go at stand-up comedy.

I grew up in a pretty strict household in the sense that we just didn't have cable, so I wasn't familiar with what stand-up comedy was. I remember telling my friends that I thought stand-up comedy was like the thing that happened before the episode of 'Seinfeld.'

'Stand-Up Planet' was Anthony Bourdain-meets-stand-up comedy.

Regardless of what I do, whether I write a book or whether I act or whether I host, I'll always do stand-up comedy because those moments, that's what I crave. If I do something funny, and I hear a crowd laugh in that moment, we're all sharing the exact same experience and the exact same feeling.

In the mid-1970s, there was this huge boom of stand-up comedy throughout North America. I went to see a show at a club called Yuk-Yuks, in Toronto, and I was just fascinated. I ended up coming back for amateur hour on a Monday at midnight and got up there without any thought as to what might come of it.

Stand-up comedy is a sickness. Who wouldn't want a room full of people laughing and screaming at you just because of who you are? Nothing is as good, except maybe having a baby.