Stand-up Comedy
| “ | I am only concerned with letting people see the truth of our lives, like, for example, the way Negroes are afraid of each other too. We have got to show the common bonds. I have an act about people staring at a Negro in the Safeway. I want people to realize that they really do stare. We must bring things out into the open. There are some people you can't reach. You neutralize this kind. If two men are laughing at each other, nobody gets stabbed." | ” |
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—Cambridge in February 1965, on his stand-up act. |
In addition to acting, Cambridge had major success as a stand-up comedian. By 1965 he was earning "as much as $4,000 a week...in all respects a headliner, working the best places, such as San Francisco's hungry i and Hollywood's Crescendo." He appeared on The Tonight Show. His routines were imbued with biting sarcasm and trenchant topical humor that was common in comedic circles at the time. He was noted for comic lapses from standard educated speech to Black street-speak.
Read more about this topic: Godfrey Cambridge
Famous quotes containing the word comedy:
“The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience we strive against every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition we trust the arduous eccentricities we’re born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created.”
—Christopher Fry (b. 1907)