Charlyne Yi Quotes

A lot of my best stuff is just ad libs on stage, and that's one thing that I've gotten back to at the live show.

When you're onstage in theater, if you mess up a line, there's no 'Cut! We'll get it again.' It's full steam ahead.

That's a lovely experience when you make an audience laugh. Then the nerves go away for a bit. And sometimes you do things then that you've never done before that are really funny.

Stand-up is live, so I'm used to being live for most of my career. It's interesting.

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

There's something interesting about playing live; you're in the moment, and I think it would be beneficial.

There's real drama in performing live. You never know how it's going to be.

I love the stage - the fact that you only have one take to get it right, the interaction with the audience, and how every show is different even though you're doing the same thing.

Every single performance of 'Fleabag,' I would learn so much from the audience reaction or how you could change it all the time, and I loved that sense that the performance is ever-growing and changing and could be affected by the audience.

Live television is just like competing on live TV. You're never going to be perfect. You just try to prepare the best that you can and execute the best that you can and try to be in the moment.

My mom was like, 'You talk so much. You have too much energy. Why don't you just join the play or something?' It was a comedy, and I got laughs in rehearsal, but onstage, in front of a whole audience, I got a lot of laughs.

When you do see me, you'll get the idea from when you see me that it's all off the top of my head. A lot of it is a beginning, middle and the end. But it's different every night. I have a lot of jokes in my back pocket I've said over the years.

I think in doing stand-up there are no rules and there's no architecture.

Stand-up is an amazing art form, I think, because it's all about you having complete control of the situation, but absolutely none.

In stand-up you can go either way. It's live. Somebody might say something in the crowd, you might respond to it. But in a movie you could be spontaneous too. But you pretty much have to stick to that story or that scene or that script, but in stand-up you can go wherever you want to. It's more freedom.

One take, so you better be ready and you better be good. One take and that was it. It was something that was spontaneous. Both Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason was like that as well.

Also I can come up with new bits - people yell stuff out and it's a new subject or a subject that I've been thinking about that I haven't done onstage yet and I'll just run with it.

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.

Live shows are where I can just go off, I do the most. I can recreate songs live and take one element and build on that that for like 40 minutes and I like seeing people's faces when I'm making something live.

There are jokes I know I want to tell, and there's sort of a rough order, but usually I try to change it up every show, to improvise and talk with the audience. I think when you tell jokes, if you're not careful, you can end up telling the whole list of jokes and then that's it. And that can get a little boring.

I think I missed all of the wonderful things ... I missed the control that you have in film, and I missed getting it right, really getting it right, the way you hope people will see it. All of the things that people love about theater - the fact that it changes every night and that it's so spontaneous - all of those things just frighten me.

I may film scenes I had no intention of filming; things suggest themselves on location, and we improvise. I try not to think about it too much. Then, in the cutting room, I take the film and start to put it together, and only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is about.

Stand-up, I find it really difficult. It's not really my thing.

When I do an hour-and-a-half show, if I don't improvise 20 minutes worth of new material each night, I feel I've let myself down.

Usually, if I think something is really funny, I'm not gonna test it. I'll just test it when I'm onstage.