Harley Quinn Smith Quotes

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.

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

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.

Laughter is binary: It either happens or it doesn't. As each joke arrives in the course of a film, the cavernous space of the theater is either filled with joy and laughter or with the quiet of cringing embarrassment. Every time you step to the plate to make a joke, you're going to experience one or the other.

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

Everyone knows the feeling where you're in the pub and you make your mates laugh. It's awesome, you feel like you rock. That's what comedians want with a bit of extra ego.

Just because you're laughing, it doesn't mean the audience will, necessarily.

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.

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

Writing your own jokes, you just kind of keep working on something until you think it might work, and then you try it out and hope for the best.

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.

You say a line and you wait for them to laugh, then you say another line and you wait... It felt weird to me. But it's interesting and the energy is almost like theatre, I suppose, with all the people there.

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.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

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.

There are these showcase clubs where 14 guys will go on in a row and people are laughing at everything, and I'm like - 'I can't laugh that much. That's so weird to me.'

Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences - and it happens all the time - where for some reason the energy doesn't connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that.

I like the purity of stand-up because it is all about whether people laugh at your jokes. Either they laugh or they don't.

Comedy can be more difficult than drama. It requires more attention to timing. In the theater, you're always dependent on the audience for the energy, but in comedy the feedback you get is more important. You can judge by the quickness and the length of the laugh just where you stand with the audience.

I'd like to go back to standup. I don't like to think I've done my last gig. At the moment it terrifies me, I get really nervous. It's a great buzz when it goes well.

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.'

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

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've always been terrible on regular sitcoms with lots of jokes. I don't know how to tell jokes.

I don't have any horror stories of trying to start as a comedian and eating it constantly on stage.