Gerard Butler Quotes

It didn't have to be a newfound respect for the craft, I knew that it's notoriously difficult and frightens a lot of people off. I don't think anyone knows quite who to attribute it to, but the dying actor who says: "dying is easy, comedy is hard." I hear it.

It seemed fun to play a villain on stage and I wanted my jokes to be so good that I could just calmly tell them on stage.

I don't think of any sentence as a "one-liner", but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key.

I have a very high respect for professional comedians. What they do astonishes me. You have to be really smart and absorb everything, repackage it, bring it back to the person, and make them laugh at themselves. I can make people laugh during my talks because they didn't come to have me make them laugh. It's added value. So my job is way easier than that of a professional comic.

Comedy's easy for me now - it's all about timing and the way you deliver lines. I use facial expressions to get the point across.

To me, if you are in the same building with Peter Sellers or John Cleese, or any of those guys and holding your own making other people laugh, that's a compliment.

I feel more comfortable in drama. Comedy's is a high-wire act. I find it stressful. It's a precision science, in a way. And when you're filming, the thing comedy depends on becomes a much more difficult commodity. The thing you depend on is spontaneity.

A lot of people think that comedic acting is a lot harder than dramatic acting, but for me it just feels natural. It's extremely calculated, you have to be aware of every beat, but I love it. I hope to have a long lasting career in comedy.

I think a lot of comedic actors, on their close-up they can deliver. But when it comes to reacting to other people being funny, that's work in itself.

Now, I think the people who are still doing stand-up are doing it because they love stand-up.

In comedy you feel you need to go back to the theatre every now and again, you feel you need to go back to an audience every now and again to see if you're still getting your craft right, making people laugh at the moments you think they should and that sort of thing.

I think being successful in comedy is being funny and making jokes - anything beyond that is the icing on the cake.

I think the best advice I'd say to any actor when you do comedy is play it straight.

Comic timing is something you are either born with or do not have.

People sometimes say how standup is so hard, and I always tell them that it's hard at the beginning.

Jerry Seinfeld, he was doing Letterman show all the time, so he kind of had an excuse, that people know the jokes already. He didn't have time to do stand-up. A guy like me, I have no excuses.

I don't want to be a facilitator for other funny people. It doesn't seem smart for me to be in a comedy and not be funny. My spirit can't take it.

When I'm doing stand-up, it's just me depending on me. I know how to go out there and make people laugh. I've been doing it since I was a teenager. I trust my instincts. I just go out and talk. A lot of the time I let the material come from the top of my head.

It's an unknown quantity. It's actually almost a cliché to say it, how hard comedy is. What's that famous quote? "Dying is easy, comedy's hard." I think the broader it gets, if you miss by a millimetre, you've missed completely. It's a very hard thing to do.

I think I'm the funniest guy in a room full of unfunny people. Unfortunately, my career is increasingly leading me into rooms where everybody is funny. I'm the least funny person in a room full of funny people.

When someone says to me, do you do stand-up I say absolutely not. I like to think of it as a theatrical performance. With me the show changes maybe five to ten percent every night. Of course, whatever I see in front of me and sometimes I get on a little run about it and it changes the show. And my delivery is such that people who have seen me many times say Gee, I never heard that before. Actually, they have, but I might have changed it around.

I'm glad that that era of stand-up is over, because I think it adversely affected a lot of people who could have been really, really great comedians. Because they unconsciously or subconsciously stifled their wild impulses, and were thinking about the five clean minutes for The Tonight Show, or the 20-minute sitcom pitch as a stand-up act.

I have a funny sense of humor. If I was a comedian and I was up on stage, people would think that's funny, because I'm a funny comedian. I'm an entertainer.

I think comedy is difficult, and I'm amazed so many people want to do it. I'll be buying jeans and somebody will say, "I'm a comedian" - the guy selling you the jeans. The desire to be a comedian is weird. I found it weird myself to want to be one; I was a schoolboy when I wanted to be one but I didn't know how to do it. That was 50 years ago, so times have changed greatly. There seems to be a long line of people desperate to do it and most of them are quite good.

Today's comics use four-letter words as a shortcut to thinking. They're shooting for that big laugh and it becomes a panic thing, using four-letter words to shock people.