Mick Foley Quotes

With a live audience, it's very clear when you've pushed it too far to the edge - because you fall off that edge and hit bottom with a thud. Nothing abstract about that. You know you went too far when you hear that groan or worse - that silence instead of the big laugh you were expecting following your hilariously edgy joke.

But I also know in standup, there's nowhere to hide. You get on stage and you deliver, or you are eviscerated and you are thrown into a pile of bodies at the bottom of a mountain.

In standup, the feedback is instantaneous, and if it fails, you know you'll be off-stage and hiding in a short time.

I remember thinking as I was doing the jokes for the first time, "If I can hear that very clearly, I'm not hearing laughter." It just became deafening, this buzzing noise. I mean, it was brutal. It was really terrible. Then I remember thinking, "At least nobody important, or anyone who I really respect, saw that." And then literally right when I went off the stage, Jerry Seinfeld got up and went on. So I was like, "Oh great. Seinfeld saw me bomb." On the other hand, I thought, "At least no one will be thinking of me anymore. They'll just be focusing on him."

When you go out there to do comedy, you feel like you're doing battle with the audience a lot of the time. You're either going to get 'em, or you're not.

It's grueling never knowing if the audience is going to think you're funny. It's soul-destroying when they don't laugh.

I wasn't exactly uncomfortable when I did my first comedy. I was just very aware of the risks; if you do a comedy that sucks, and you suck in it, then you won't get a chance to do it again.

Comedy clubs can be brutal. Those people are for real, and if you aren't funny, they aren't laughing. They don't care who you are.

I did my first set at a talent show, and I couldn't finish because the judges didn't like my jokes. They were 'offensive.'

In comedy, when you bomb, especially at The Comedy Store in front of a sold-out house? I think it would have been way worse if I bombed there than losing a UFC fight.

There is a magical, unexplainable phenomenon that still occurs to this day where, however funny you think the material you've written is, as soon as you turn up to a gig to try it out, it becomes almost incoherent.

[sam] Kinison, when he started out, he'd come to Canada when I was first starting, and he'd always [bomb].

Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer.

Thinking up jokes is easy. The hard part is trying them out on stage, because you never know if they're funny until you get there. Not one comedian in the world ever really knows.

There isn't a comedian in the world that hasn't bombed.

When you're going for a joke, you're stuck out there if it doesn't work. There's nowhere to go. You've done the drum role and the cymbal clash and you're out on the end of the plank.

Every night when I go out on stage, there's always one nagging fear in the back of my mind. I'm always afraid that somewhere out there, there is one person in the audience that I'm not going to offend!

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.

I started to do a study on how not to do stand-up comedy. Yeah, it's lonely work. You die, you die alone. It's you, the light, and the audience. If you win, you win big. If you lose, you lose big time.

When you're onstage and you know you're bombing, that's very, very scary. Because you know you gotta keep going - you're bombing, but you can't stop.

One time I happened to use the word 'denigrate' onstage, and it didn't get any reaction. So as I continued my act, the left side of my brain was fast-forwarding to see if I had any other big words coming up.

When you improvise, you work off the laughs from the audience, but when you step on stage to do standup, it's silent.

Stand-up is successful if they laugh. It's unsuccessful if they don't laugh.

You know you're on stage being the life of the party and trying to get laughs, and then, in a lot of ways, you don't have anything to give once you give it to the people.

Doing drama is, in a sense, easier. In doing comedy, if you don't get that laugh, there's something wrong.