1. I have a great amount of respect for him, because he’s one of the first comedians to speak about his cancer experience.
He has been listed by Forbes as one of the top-earning comedians and is the highest-paid comedian per capita. He also appeared on both seasons of Comedians of a Feather: The Comedy Crowd.
He has appeared on the ‘TBS Late Night’ and ‘CBS Late show’ and in 2016 he was named as the ‘Best Actor’ at the ‘Outstanding Guest Actor’ category at the 67th Annual Tony Awards. Some of his films have been Oscar nominated including ‘Green Book’ and ‘The Irishman’.
Here are our favorite quotes from comedian Sebastian Maniscalco.
50 Famous Sebastian Maniscalco Quotes
You can’t just assume that you can relate to a joke without actually trying to get into the head of the person who made it. It’s important to understand how your audience feels. Also, how they think.
Sebastian’s career started as an open mic comedian. He now tours nationally and internationally, appearing on Conan, Jimmy Kimmel and Chelsea Lately.
When I was a kid, we went to church on Sunday dressed as all sorts of people. We went as angels, dogs, lions, clowns, and many other things.
This is the best thing about the show. These guys know their shit. They all have their own styles and their own jokes and things like that, but they all have something in common – the ability to make you laugh. They don’t always hit the same jokes, but they always hit the same audience.
Maniscalco has seen a lot of changes in the landscape of comedy, including the advent of the internet. Maniscalco is more comfortable now than he once was, but if you asked him at the beginning of his career, he’d have never guessed that he’d be sitting on this stage today.
“It took me eight to ten years to really formulate what I was doing on stage and start to get really personal with comedy. I always really had timing naturally, it was just about trying to figure out how that timing was going to work on stage.”
Caleb Kilzer.
It can bring people together. I’ve had a few situations where friends have come together through food. We were all living in New York City and one of my friends was on the wait list for an apartment there. He had no idea how to ask about it and thought I had a connection at the real estate company. I met up with him and we decided to go for dinner, and then some other friends joined us.
Early on in his career, Sebastian had the opportunity to work at a restaurant. He felt that he was funny and he was able to tell a joke to a table of four people. They all loved his jokes and he loved their reaction.
A friend of mine, a successful business owner, was trying to tell me how to grow my business. He was frustrated because he hadn’t seen much success in his career. I told him, “You should start a business when you’re 8 years old.” He couldn’t believe it. That’s the life lesson I learned.
10th of 50 Sebastian Maniscalco Quotes
I’ve never seen a group of people more like they’re crazy than the people at the post office. They look like they’re crawling out from under rocks just to go to the post office.
Sebastian Maniscalco is talking about Wal-Mart, the discount superstore, in which you can get a lot of things for relatively cheap. He goes into Wal-Mart, and it’s like, “You go into Wal-Mart, and you see stuff you typically wouldn’t see anywhere else.” Wal-Mart is the place where you can buy a lot of stuff at a low price, like the cheap, low-end stuff.
Sebastian grew up watching Johnny Carson. They were both from Brooklyn. Johnny was Italian, like Sebastian, and Sebastian was Jewish, like Johnny. Johnny and Sebastian got along so well because they both loved telling bad jokes, but it wasn’t their only thing in common. Johnny had an apartment above the Penn Plaza Bagel Restaurant on 37th and Broadway, and Sebastian worked as a bagel guy there for a year.
Johnny would ask Sebastian if he knew the difference between a bagel and a doughnut, and of course Sebastian did.
Not sure if he’d call his career in comedy a success, but he has three Netflix specials and it looks like he’s still loving it.
“I go to Vegas now and I go to the casino, and I gamble, and there’s a guy in a wet bathing suit gambling right next to me.” – S.M.
Comedy is a physical medium as much as it is a verbal one. If you don’t have the correct physical delivery you’re not going to get the reaction you desire. Sometimes audiences get angry when they’re unable to see a comedian’s facial expressions. Sometimes audiences get angry because of the delivery. Either way, the physical aspect doesn’t really matter as much as the delivery.
I went to a show where John Mulaney was performing. He was really funny. I’d watch Johnny’s monologue and get super excited any time he had a comedian on. It was just the two of them. The place was packed. It was a great show.
While being interviewed in the Big Mouth Live show, comedian Sebastian Maniscalco said that when it was time for him to pick a career, he had only one goal: to be the best he could be. He also said that he was the product of his parents and grandparents who were immigrants, who had already achieved something in their careers in Italy.
Sebastian Maniscalco is a regular on Showtime at the Apollo, but for good reason. He’s got a show on Comedy Central, and he’s booked a spot on The Late Show.
“Like a man with a pet bird” describes why Sebastian Maniscalco is such an observer of absurdities.
20th of 50 Sebastian Maniscalco Quotes
Sebastian Maniscalco also has a podcast called The Manischewitz Diaries that has episodes with The Daily Show’s Eric Boehlert.
The podcast interviews comedian stars of a comedy show, and the comedians get into a very funny and candid conversation.
Maniscalco also has a stand up special available for purchase or streaming.
I do believe that every heckler is unique, because they say something, and you respond to what they say or what they’re wearing or who they’re with. A heckle is one of the few times people actually go right up to you and speak to you, so you’re reacting to them the most, as well as reacting to whatever they say.
The comedian has always lived by some of his mother’s strict rules, which he used to convey a message through his body.
The most difficult part of comedy is writing a plot. It takes more effort than just making jokes. For example, a punchline is easier. It’s just a concept, whereas a joke is much more difficult.
Sebastian Maniscalco says that, as an immigrant from Italy, he was always taught to work hard and be honest and be a contributing member of society, so even though he is a stand-up comedian instead of a doctor or lawyer, he still tries to live by that same philosophy that immigrants are taught.
He says that he used to hide his ability to act or perform in public in fear of being labeled crazy. In the past, he was considered as crazy as the “crazy comedian” he once described.
I think it is safe to say that most people do not have an authentic online presence. There is a lot of self-promotion and narcissism.
Standup comedy and comedy clubs often have a live audience because they are more energetic and spontaneous. If the audience is online, they are usually a little more subdued, because they can’t make eye contact with the audience. Plus, the audience is far away from the performer. In a Zoomedian, the audience is online, so they can all look each other in the eye as they are discussing a topic. It’s a lot less of a focus group in which the audience must participate. You don’t really need “energy of a crowd ” to be a comedian at a Zoomedian, as the audience can be virtually present.
We all know how to dress for a good time, I guess that’s Sebastian’s approach.
30th of 50 Sebastian Maniscalco Quotes
We saw a guy eating his steak wearing flip-flops and we asked him why he wore them. He said that it’s very comfortable and there are no restrictions with flip-flops. We thought that he was crazy and he said that all he was concerned about was what he looked like with his feet showing.
He was an actor and comedian. He said he was doing stand-up comedy mostly because he wanted to make ‘a living’.
Sebastian knows that sometimes it’s necessary to have some “banter” with the audience. Sometimes, somebody will say something, and he’ll say something right back, and everybody laughs, and it’s funny.
He had a unique way of telling family stories of his day, and it was one of the things that made him stand out to me as a child. I could see that I could relate to him in a way that I could not to other comedians. Even when I was a kid, I could relate to him on that level.
I had a lot of time to grow and develop my act and the reason for that was I was working with a guy named Bob Bogle, who was a magician. Bob Bogle taught me everything I know about magic and I learned a lot from him. Because of that Bob Bogle, I had time to cultivate my act and feel really comfortable on stage and that’s when my career really began to take off.
In the 1980’s, Arlington Heights was considered the “Little Apple,” a suburb with a small town feel. Sebastian grew up in Arlington Heights and now lives in the Chicago city that sits just across the river from the area he grew up in.
As a matter of fact they did hear the same thing. This is a bit of a false narrative that the new wave of comedy has created in its own right.
I think most of the really successful comedians start with a tiny audience — and they slowly build from there. You get a few laughs, then you get a few laughs, then you get a few laughs, and then you get a few laughs and people will start telling their friends.
To see comedy in person, you must be physically present at the venue where it’s being performed. It just makes sense.
I like Las Vegas because it gives me an opportunity to gauge my material in front of a very diverse group of people. There are a lot of different people in the audience, and you can kind of get a barometer for how my material plays throughout the country.
40th of 50 Sebastian Maniscalco Quotes
To make sure you are having fun and that you are not overworking yourself.
After growing up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, the comedian Sebastian Maniscalco thought it was a long way to the City of Angels.
While growing up in Chicago, it was not a very fun time for the Maniscalco family. Their first vacation as a family only meant going to the beach and eating food that was not really healthy.
It was awkward.
Growing up, my father told me don’t ever tell anyone your salary.
Keep it a secret.
I never set out to make a lot of money or be famous.
Maniscalco says he once did the “flip-flop” joke he used to perform in San Diego, but he was booed. He says it’s all in good fun – though his audience was likely not amused. Maniscalco has been known for his funny jokes that often involve physical humor.
It’s not that we don’t care about good customer reviews, it’s just that we know there is money to be made in the reviews. You can’t make money off of bad reviews, we make money off of both good and bad reviews, bad is not free.
There are a lot of comedians out there that’s making good money off telemarketing, and this guy thinks that he’ll make money off the internet and social media. I like to call it the “Internet of Dumbasses” because most people don’t really know what they’re doing online. I did a little research, and from what I’ve seen, people who use social media tend to be a little less intelligent.
I was worried about the people who would buy my product and how I was going to make it funny. I also didn’t know what kind of audience I was going to draw. It was only when I put it into practice that I realised that people loved it. That’s when I knew I had an ability to make people laugh.
I hate being messy. I love to throw stuff away.
This is the first of many times that I will state that his work in the comedy world is the most underrated in comedy. His work in the standup world, though, is phenomenal. He’s been on Letterman, Conan, and countless other shows. He’s a big star.
49. “My parents are Polish and Italian, and there is a lot of Italian in me.
He was a stand-up comedian from the age of 12, and even after he moved overseas to New York, he found a way to get back into the comedy world in order to be able to perform for a living.
Summary
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