Sean Lock Quotes

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.

If I see someone not laughing, the first thing I'm thinking is, "OK, am I cursing too much? Am I doing a joke he doesn't understand? Is he resting?" Then he starts becoming my focal point. Once I see him laugh, I'm like, [snap] "All right, now I'm funny."

I realized that 'performing' was what I wanted to do when I did my first professional gig as a dancer with my company 'Synergy' in Canada. I was overwhelmed with how it felt to perform in front of an audience.

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.

With stand-up, it doesn't matter who you are. If the audience claps because they love your movies, that clapping stops after five seconds, and then it's your job to make them laugh.

When you're a stand-up, you play in front of 600 people, and it's all about timing. I could never do stand-up comedy; it would be way too hard for me.

TV is easier: it's all planned out for you and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over.

If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room; you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything. I've written lots of material, but how do you memorise 90 minutes? That's one hell of a long speech. I've always had problems with that.

If I walk out onstage and I get a warm, excited response, it makes me feel so confident and happy, and then it's so easy for me up there.

TV is easier: it's all planned out for you, and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up, but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over. To me, that's more pure.

Any audience that gets a laugh out of me gets it while I'm facing them.

If you are a great dramatic actor then you often don't know if people are enjoying your stuff at all because they are sitting there in silence.

As a comedian, I'm forced to have a tough skin. Until people laugh, they are detractors. You walk into a new audience where nobody knows you, they go: 'Make us laugh. Show us what you're made of. Prove why we should be listening to you.'

We as comics do want an immediate response from the audience. It's really quiet on the set, and there are only the producers, and the director, so a comic is looking for someone to give a reaction, even if it is the camera guy.

The audience changes every night. You're the same person. You have to speak your mind and do the stuff that you think is funny and makes you laugh.

Impressions are still kind of hard for me and not what I love to do the most, but with characters, I think there's an element of fearlessness. You try to figure out the best reading and wording of the jokes before the show, and then you just really have to go hard.

Being able to write jokes is great, but you still have to get used to performing them and being on stage - and enjoying being on stage, not just like tolerating it.

With stand-up you can just be yourself on stage. And ideally, you can't see the crowd most of the time - it's just lights in your face. But I still have had terrible stage fright.

I am a stress buster. Because I knew what people react or think after watching me on screen and I love it.

I'm neurotic by nature, but I'm wary of becoming more of a play than a comic - you don't want people coming to see a man having a breakdown for two hours. I'd prefer them coming to hear my astute and witty observations.

For me, stand-up comedy is a conversation between me and the audience. I have to keep them listening. When I'm making jokes about cake for twenty minutes, I have to make sure my audience is interested and following where I'm going.

I've learnt that from stand-up - you should always worry that it's going to go badly, otherwise you're too laissez faire.

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.

The more comfortable I got onstage, the more comfortable I got expressing myself in a physical manner. And it almost shocked people - 'Oh, is there something happening?'

There's a lot of nuances to stand-up that you definitely see when you watch someone like Chris Rock in that his body position is also part of why the joke works.