I'm glad that that era of stand-up is over, because I think it adversely affected a lot of people who could have been really, really great comedians. Because they unconsciously or subconsciously stifled their wild impulses, and were thinking about the five clean minutes for The Tonight Show, or the 20-minute sitcom pitch as a stand-up act.
Any comedian who tells you how dark and dangerous they are, they're not dark and dangerous.
I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.
Here's what I'm afraid of. I know a lot of comedians, friends of mine, who just got into the "Doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter. They're just gonna laugh anyway."
Before doing my first open mic, I was sitting in the back watching all these comedians banter back and forth and fire jokes and up each other, and I thought, This is where I wanna be.
In my mind, I was always a comedian who was going to branch into writing.
Appurv Gupta brings you a unique point of view that no other comedian in India does. Well worth a watch.
If you think something's funny, go with that. Most comedians pull jokes from a place of honesty.
I suppose in our culture - in our lifetime - we've always enjoyed people who tell it straight. We like our presidents, our comedians, and our actors to do that . . . It's funny. You say that people prefer a tasteful formalism - as opposed to an oppressive formalism - but I do feel very strongly that form follows function.
Comedians are the most challenging people for me to shoot. Because you're not actually in the dialogue with them, they are performing. When I work with a comedian, I become their audience.
If you're watching a comedian on television and he's making a political point, I would say he's gotten too serious.
Because I'm around comedians all the time, in my downtime I tend not to watch comedy. Something the whole family enjoys is 'You've Been Framed!' It satisfies all of us. It's universal, and we all laugh a lot.
I don't want to follow comedians because I don't want to see what they're thinking about, 'cause then maybe I won't stumble across a thought maybe I had about the same subject.
Although I'm a comedian, I'm also an amateur survivalist.
I mostly want to highlight things that feel like an injustice, and that's not really political. No one is going to - or should - say that bigotry toward Muslims is partisan. It's a matter of being just or not being just. So that's why I started calling myself a social justice comedian.
In general, comedians are attracted to vice.
Who's famous anymore? No one. There are these comedians that are famous in a weird way. There are comedians, like Anjelah Johnson and Russell Peters, [who] are unbelievably famous, but in a way they're selling out 1,000-person stadiums.
I'm not a comedian. I don't make things funny if they're not funny. I don't invent funny stuff.
Pakistan hasn't been cast in the role of... interesting cultural place or, you know, land of great comedians.
I always made people laugh, and everybody wanted me to sit at the table with them. I don't joke as much as I used to, but I can still be a little comedian every now and then.
I find my fans are really funny people. Most comedians can't say that about their fans.
You're always on duty because you're in a constant state of observation. That's one of the challenges of being a comedian. I think one of the other challenges is that, whether we like it or not, it's a profession that requires failure. It doesn't just encourage failure. It requires it because it's all trial and error. You need to know what doesn't work to know what works.
From my experience working with comedians, there is that competitive aspect. With actors, for instance, they don't want to look competitive even if they are, whereas comedians, I think, are openly happy to play on the idea that they all compete with each other to get the laughs. There's something about comedy, I think, that encourages that. There's this kind of schoolboy sense of wanting to top the other person that we play off of to show them competing for who's smarter or cleverer.
Philosophers, comedians, and tipsy birthday celebrants all have proposed theories about why time seems to move increasingly swiftly as we grow older. But the most disconcerting rationale is not a theory. It is the undeniable realization that every day we live constitutes a smaller percentage of the accrued experience with which we awaken each morning, and therefore seems proportionately a smidgen quicker and smaller than the day before.
That's the thing that most people don't realize. In real life, comedians aren't funny. They save it. They save it up.
