David Alan Basche Quotes

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

There is nothing more joyful to me than hearing a live audience laugh. Especially when I planned it that way!

Comedy is like math - you can check your answer because you know you've gotten it right if you get a laugh. It just makes sense to me. I feel like because I've had to keep that tool in my box for so long, I'm ready to show it off a bit.

Here's the thing, with comedy - and I learned this from Will Ferrell - you can't be ashamed. If you're doing comedy, you have to fully commit to the joke. Shame is not part of it. If you act shy or uncomfortable about your body, that makes the audience shy and uncomfortable. And in a comedy you just want them to loosen up and laugh.

In comedy, though, it's good to get feedback from the audience about what they find funny.

When you're doing stand-up, you can comment if something fails, get a laugh from that.

The greatest comedian I've ever seen is Jack Benny. He wasn't afraid of the silences.

Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

I really loved what I was doing being creative and being funny as a stand-up comedian.

If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned laughter is cheating.

With comedy, it's really hard to tell if something's working on the page - you really need the actors to bring it alive. The scariest part is if people will laugh or not.

Regardless of what kind of film, the number one rule of comedy is to never take yourself too seriously and then the next rule is you can't have any self-consciousness, otherwise it kills the laugh, and that will never change.

I was not influenced by Jack Benny, and people have remarked on my timing and Jack's timing, but I don't think you can teach timing. It's something you hear in your head.

I wanted to be a comedian.

I'm a frustrated stand-up comic. If you hand me a microphone and I get one laugh, then I'll go on for 20 minutes.

The basic function of a comic is stand-up because it's so straightforward and simple. If the audience don't laugh, you didn't do your job. I've had some audiences where I didn't care if they laughed or not because they were either too drunk or stupid.

When you're a standup comic, you get up and you try stuff, and you're always kind of seeing how far you can push things.

Making people laugh is magic. I feel like if you have humility, then you can do anything in comedy.

A lot of the time, you're supposed to play to the top of your intelligence, as truthful as possible. But when you're on stage making people laugh, you're still acting. I think it helped me a bunch to go on stage two or three times a week.

The jokes are great but what really matters for a comedian is his performance, his whole attitude, and the laughs that he gets between the jokes rather than on top of the jokes.

Comedy is the hardest thing to get right. I remember a joke we did in 'What's Up, Doc?' that didn't get a single laugh. So we moved the shot a foot-and-a-half to one side, and all of a sudden, the laugh was there. It drives you crazy; the balance is so delicate.

Comedy requires a lot of energy.

I know what I want to talk about, but I don't really know what's funny about a joke until I perform it in front of an audience.

I think you develop strong instincts when you're a comedian. You have to pay your bills by making people laugh every six seconds... or not. I had to do that for 22 years.