Kevin Nealon

“I grew up watching stand-ups and thought it was so entertaining and unique - you didn't see that as a job description anywhere.”

“I feel guilty: when I'm not golfing, I feel like I should be golfing. And when I'm golfing, I feel like I should be home working or spending time with the family. So it's a real conundrum.”

“As a comedian, you're kind of like a blues musician; you have to live a little bit.”

“I just loved stand-up comics as a kid. I'd watch them on 'The Tonight Show,' and I thought what a great craft it was to come out on stage with no instrument or anything and be able to entertain people.”

“What happened was, I always wanted to be a singer/songwriter kind of guy like a James Taylor or Crosby, Stills and Nash type of thing; I went to a lot of coffee houses and used to watch all those guys, but I never had the nerve to get up and do it because singing seems so personal and intimate to me. It was too revealing.”

“Standup really is a young man's game, a single young man's game. Even when I was younger, when I wasn't single, it was hard to be on the road because you go through relationships because your girlfriend kinda got tired of you being gone.”

“Don't play dead with a vulture. That's exactly what they want.”

“The funny thing about commercials to me is that many of them now don't even mention the product until the very end. You don't really know what the commercial is all about. They're kind of like little movies, like shorts, and that's why I think they're so entertaining.”

“If people can't deal with their problems, they numb themselves a little bit.”

“Basically, I'm a people pleaser who has a knack for disappointing.”

“You don't want to throw out a good idea and have nobody get excited about it. It takes the wind out of your sails.”

“I was born in St. Louis; I lived there for three weeks and then my father graduated from St. Louis University, so we all got in the car and split. I don't really remember much. I grew up in Connecticut most of my life and then four years in Germany. My father worked for a helicopter company, so we went over there.”

“It is a great rush to come up with a joke that gets a good response from the audience. It's gold!”

“You really have to be ambitious and have that drive to really become well known and successful as a standup.”

“The thing is when I started doing standup, you had to have a clean act because that's how you got on television. There weren't all these cable shows. Also, I didn't want to have that kind of act in case my family came to see me or my kid one day.”

“All I ever wanted to do was stand-up. It kind of charges me and gives me a rush.”

“My adrenaline is definitely going, but it's mostly my real, laid-back persona carrying over on stage. When I first started, I was nervous, I'd be really high energy, and I'd be sweating. Now it's just my job. It's like a machinist who goes to work every day and uses the same drill bits. He's not worried about taking his finger off.”

“I like YouTube; it's really entertaining. A lot of it is crappy stuff, but there are a couple diamonds in the rough there.”

“When I first began doing TV pilots, my expectations were high. I didn't understand that world. So when 'Weeds' took off, I was so happy. Especially as I was just a guest star in the pilot. But once it got picked up, they made me a regular cast member.”

“A lot of baby boomers are baby bongers.”