David Steinberg

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.

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.

When I started, you didn't make a lot of money by being a comedian. You didn't get a lot of respect.

Comedians talk to other comedians the way jazz musicians can talk to each other.

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.

Being a lawyer in New York sucks because you're working eighty, sometimes a hundred hours a week.

Your relationship with an agent has got to be mutually beneficial. If you can't help their careers, then they're not going to be interested.

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.

The whole idea of doing the Hollywood thing never even occurred to me. When you grow up on the East coast, Hollywood seems like this fantasy land and you don't think that people can actually make a living there.

My influences were Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce.

I rewrote it and I took all your notes. Read it again, that kind of persistence paid off.

The odd thing about comedy is that the more personal you are, the larger the audience.