The real motivation of being a comedian is if you really love the sound of a laugh.

The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

If you like a daily slight terror, you will like being a stand-up comedian.

A comedian is basically a very aggressive thing to do. You force people to see things your way so powerfully, they react audibly! They actually-- you force them to react. It's "Look at things the way I look at them, and laugh at it when I say to!"

The great thing about being a comedian is that it kind of doesn't matter how you look. It's actually a disadvantage to be too good-looking. There's a Darwinian advantage to being funny. If you're a good-looking fella, you can't be bothered to make up jokes.

That's the greatest thing about comedy. If you've got talent, it's unmistakable. No one misses it and you don't have to wait around for a break.

I always say to young people, you can have the best script, be the funniest man, but if they don't laugh — you're not a comedian.

Everybody needs laughs, so the fact that I've had the opportunity to make people laugh for a living is one of the many blessings that I have received in my life.

A comedian is a-- to me, a-- a full-fledged-- not only a monologist, but somebody who can really work a room, work a crowd, and has a real act. A comic? That's a-- like-- I think a notch down.

I think being successful in comedy is being funny and making jokes - anything beyond that is the icing on the cake.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

Being funny has not that much to do with what a great comedy act is about. A great comedy act is a machine that's built. Being funny is the fuel, but you gotta have a whole machine to burn it, and that's the act.

I think at the beginning, comedy was just an opportunity to earn money, especially after realising how good I was at it. But I didn’t think as far as making it an actual career out of it or realising my purpose through it. It only hit me when I did So You Think You Are Funny that there is something bigger than what I had perceived.

The best kind of comedy to me is when you make people laugh at things they’ve never laughed at, and also take a light into the darkened corners of people’s minds, exposing them to the light.