Colin Quinn still sticks to things he knows best

His insistence on performing only material he's written himself might have cost him over the years.
By JOHN BENSON
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
You have to admire comedian Colin Quinn for sticking to his principles, even if in the long run his career may have suffered.
"Unless I wrote it, I don't want to do it," said Quinn, calling from his Brooklyn, N.Y., home. "That makes it more difficult, I guess. I'm always trying to work on other things I wrote, but I don't ever like to do anybody else's things, so I never audition or try to take jobs if somebody offers me another gig."
The problem for Quinn is he's had too much individual success over the past 20 years. Perhaps if he was still a starving comic, it may be time to re-evaluate the career, but when you look at his r & eacute;sum & eacute; -- from MTV's late-'80s popular game show "Remote Control" and host of A & amp;E's "Caroline's Comedy Hour" to his five-year stint as writer and feature player ("Weekend Update" host) on "Saturday Night Live" -- it's obvious he's got the talent.
So much in fact that NBC gave him his own sketch comedy program "The Colin Quinn Show" and later Comedy Central did the same with "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn." Both were short-lived with the latter being on the air for three seasons. Perhaps the silver lining for Quinn is the reality that there are so many variables -- ratings, time slots, exposure, promotion -- that come together to make a hit television show.
"No, not really," Quinn said with a laugh. "It only makes me madder. I think about the other people getting screwed too. I wrote [a new television show] but again I'm not getting it to the right people. I'm going through a time now where I just left my manager of 10 years and my agent. I'm trying to find somebody to pitch my stuff and get it in there."
Doing the club circuit
While Quinn waits for the green light for his next project, the 47-year-old funnyman remains active on the comedy club circuit, where he spends roughly 30 weeks a year. Based on his incessant need to write new material, he believes he's unlike most touring comedians on the road today. Quinn appears Saturday at the Funny Farm Comedy Club inside the Holiday Inn MetroPlex Ballroom in Liberty.
"It became like a habit but a great habit for a comedian," Quinn said. "It started when I did 'Weekend Update' and then when I did 'Tough Crowd,' I had to do it because I was writing my monologue every day. So now I talk about everything. Things from up until what happens the day before. I'm just making fun of everything that goes on -- Barack, Hillary, Rudy and McCain. Nobody else is doing that. They're dusting off their old jokes, and I'm ready."
So, ready as a comedian but still waiting for the perfect vehicle to break him into comedy elite, Quinn is honest when asked whether he's content with his career.
"No, but I love doing stand-up," Quinn said. "It's a weird thing because on the one hand I'm not happy because I see other things happening and I've written other things and I'm like, 'Hey, how do you allow that (expletive) and not mine,' but on the other hand, if I had to do one thing for the rest of my life, I'd choose stand-up. So I'm not happy, I'm not content. But I'm happy in the sense that I know that I'm happy to be doing the thing that I love the most, stand-up."