How eight beloved stand-up comics got their starts (2024)

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Less than two weeks before his high school graduation, Lopez, 62, went onstage for the first time.

It was June 4, 1979. Lopez and a friend had heard about a local kid who performed at the Comedy Store in Westwood, Calif. After some encouragement, Lopez made the journey and waited two hours for his three-minute slot. He got a stranger to buy him some wine and used a pen to shove the cork into the bottle so he could drink it.

At first, it was tough going for the “Lopez vs Lopez” actor. “And then toward the end of the three minutes, I nailed a couple pretty good ones,” he said. “So I think I did decent. I mean, it wasn’t silent. I would say 40 percent of 100. For somebody that was scared of everything. I’m not sure why, not only did I go that first time, but kept going. I still haven’t figured that out.”

Of that first experience, Lopez said, “I’m so proud of the fact that I went up there once. It changed my life from black-and-white to color.”

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Oswalt, 55, began his stand-up career on July 18, 1988, at a Washington comedy club. The 19-year-old, who had just finished his freshman year at William & Mary, prepared for his stage debut by watching lots of other open mic performers. As for material, he relied on instinct. “I just kind of wrote what I thought was a funny set and then went up and completely ate it,” said Patton.

“What I realized years later was the importance of my first open mic wasn’t to go up and get laughs,” said the comedian and actor, who recently starred in Apple TV Plus’s “Manhunt.” “It was to go up and get over the fear and overthinking about going onstage.”

That first stand-up experience is a blank, Oswalt says now, he only remembers that the audience was not overwhelmed. Nonetheless, his time onstage sparked an epiphany. “I got no positive feedback from going onstage, but I look back at a thing that gave me no positive feedback [and] I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he said.

What did he take away from it? “This is probably what I should do with my life.”

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The first time Iglesias, 47, did stand-up he was 10 years old. He went onstage during a school talent show and wowed the auditorium with impressions of cartoon characters. A decade after his childhood debut, Iglesias gave stand-up a real go when a local event was looking for a host. It was April 10, 1997, at a Best Western hotel bar in Long Beach, Calif.

He experienced a roller coaster of emotions, he said, ranging from total fear to euphoria when he made the audience laugh. That taste of stand-up prompted Iglesias to quit his well-paying cellphone salesman job.

“I’m an attention whor*. I love attention. I love being up in front of people,” he said. “I was always the chubby kid. I was always the one that didn’t get picked in sports. I was always the one who had just one friend. So to get that level of attention, it’s an incredible feeling of acceptance that you crave and you want when you don’t get it.”

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Cho, 55, began doing stand-up in her early teens at the San Francisco School of the Arts. Her theater teacher had students perform sketches and skits for the class, and in time they graduated from the classroom to the local public access TV station. She also signed the kids up for open-mic nights, where Cho was teamed with Sam Rockwell — yes, that Sam Rockwell. Between gigs, she performed solo at the comedy club above her parents’ bookstore.

They were juvenile jokes and skits, Cho said, but they gave her a head start. And an incentive to do her best: The club sold tomatoes for patrons to lob at unfunny comedians. Thankfully, she was never on the receiving end of one.

“[Stand-up] is an art form that will take a lifetime to really master,” Cho said, “that you’re continually learning and growing as an artist. And I think that [it’s] something that you never quite figure out. Every audience is different and every experience is different.”

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Before her first stand-up set, Leggero, 50, locked herself in her studio apartment for two days. She refused to see anyone, spending every waking minute writing pages and pages of material. The two years of comedy classes, half a Xanax and half a glass of wine paid off when she was engulfed in laughter at the Belly Room at The Comedy Store in West Hollywood in 2002.

“Everyone was just laughing on cue at the things that I was saying. It was almost like the laughter was hitting me like waves. It truly was an out-of-body experience, and it was just like these waves coming over me. And then it would start back up again,” she said.

The next time she did stand-up, she was hit with waves of negativity instead. She may have called the bar and/or its patrons smelly. “I kind of crawled offstage. But I do remember coming home and just kind of falling face-flat on my bed and just realizing this is going to take a while,” she said. “But also because the first one was so great, I wanted to keep going.”

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Peretti, 46, had known she was funny since the eighth grade. So when she got an opportunity to do stand-up at the Parkside Lounge in New York’s East Village in the early 2000s, she took it — and bombed.

“I think I just was literally like, no, no, no, no, no, I didn’t do well,” she said of that first time. Rather than discouraging her, the experience made her more determined. “It’s like a desire to kind of figure out the game — and how to have a win.”

Peretti said her background in stand-up was useful when writing and directing her feature film, “First Time Female Director.” Originally, the script began further into the narrative, but Peretti understood that some jokes only work when you know the backstory.

“I feel like when you’re first starting out, so much of it is figuring out who you are and how to communicate it quickly to people in a way that gets a laugh and kind of gets them oriented right out of the gate,” she said.

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The week before his 18th birthday, Cross, 59, graced the audiences of a suburban Atlanta Punchline with a set so “bizarrely amazing” that “if you scripted it and saw it in a movie, you’d be like, ‘All right, that’s a bit over the top.’”

Cross wasn’t nervous about the performance, he was anxious to get onstage — and then anxious to do it again.

“I came offstage and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m amazing. I’m a natural. I should probably try to get on “The Tonight Show” tomorrow,’” Cross said. “And then more expectedly and more realistically the next, I don’t know, 15 sets I did I bombed. As I should’ve — that’s what’s meant to happen in the first place.”

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Gaffigan, 57, was on his way to being your funny uncle when he first did stand-up in “1989 or 1990” at the Duplex in New York’s West Village. At the time, he had a degree from Georgetown University, a stable ad agency job and a fear of public speaking. Gaffigan decided to take an improv class to work on that last one.

“I remember it very vividly because … it was one of those things where it felt immediately familiar,” said Gaffigan. “There was something about that initial time onstage where I didn’t know if I was going to be a comedian, but I knew that I was going to continue doing this. It was like an itch had been scratched.” Then he bombed for the next six months.

That first performance was less than a year after his mom died. The act of creating and performing his own comedy felt and still feels cleansing, he said. “No matter if I’m in a really sad place or in a really high place, it moderates me. It’s this balancing thing for my emotions and, simultaneously, it’s this moment of empowerment.”