Quotes and Jokes by David Steinberg


Top 15 Quotes (out of 43)








A lot of young people make the mistake of going into comedy just because it's a lucrative business, as opposed to earlier, even Steven and I, we were in 'Second City,' we never... thought of going beyond 'Second City' in Chicago.




The one thing an audience always has in common with a comedian is troubles. The Yiddish word for that is tsuris. You're always putting your tsuris on stage whether you like it or not. No one is untroubled, unless they're just, you know, an imbecile.


The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to do a documentary on your life and you're watching it with an audience and there's not a laugh.


My influences were Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce.


You can’t be comfortable in whatever that societal group is – kindergarten, school, basketball, whatever. You have to have an outsider point of view.


My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I'm from Canada. I left there at 16.




You get to a philosophy after a while that everything is sort of cycling in a way. You know I have a sort of capsulized philosophy that your success is so relative. When you’re a baby success is not wetting your bed. When you’re a teenager success is going all the way. When you’re a young man success is making money. When you are middle aged success is being happy. When you’re an old man success is going all the way. And when you’re really old it’s not wetting your bed.


The interesting thing about improvisation is you're making something up in front of the audience. Now music helps you out a little bit because you have an instrument that'll separate you from the audience.


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.

