David Steinberg

Comedian

1942-08-09

Quotes by David Steinberg

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

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• In comedy, looking back is more important than looking around at your contemporaries because they are too much influenced by the same time period as you are.

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• 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.

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• I starred in a Broadway play that was Sidney Poitier's first directing job and the cast was Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Diana Ladd and I played a Jewish kid who offered himself as a slave to two Columbia University students as reparations.

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• Silences are the most underrated part of comedy.

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• And it was a huge emotional thing to leave the law and become unemployed - to be a student again.

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• 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.

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• My father never lived to see his dream come true of an all Yiddish speaking Canada.

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• Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan - a Mount Rushmore of incompetence.

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