Vanessa Bayer Quotes

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

Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to have someone in a seat in a theater laughing so hard that they're making weird sounds.

For comedy, timing is key.

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

When you're doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.

A joke is a way to say, 'I'm going to do something funny now. If I don't get a laugh at the end, I'm a failure.'

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

Kind of the exhausting thing about doing pure comedy, or something that's broader, is you're kind of a slave to the laugh. If it's not funny, then there's not much point in doing it. The kind of ueber-objective is to make people laugh. You always have to have that in the back of your mind, 'Eh, I've got to figure out a way to make this funny.'

If something strikes me as funny, I'll put it in my performance.

I think everyone's different but in comedy, I try to do my scene to make the director and the other actors laugh. If I can make them laugh and we have the same sensibility, then I'm on the right page.

Comedy is very difficult. I love it because when you do it right, it's the best feeling in the world.

Comedy is hard to do. All the cliches about it are true.

There's an art to comedy.

I am not a joke-teller. Stand-up, I couldn't do.

There's no idea or concept in comedy you could do that hasn't been attacked from some angle. But if you start leaving punchlines out so you'll look cool, I don't get that. But I don't watch standup anyway, so I don't know what they're doing.

Comedy and music are so similar because it's all about timing.

Comedy is not easy to do - where you make someone laugh out loud in their living room.

One night in a club in Boston, I tried the name Roger Duck. No laughs. The next night, I tried Orson Bean, putting together a pompous first name and a silly second name. I got laughs, so I decided to keep it.

Do you know what the key to comedy is? Timing.

As a comic, you are trying to please people in some way - to make them laugh.

Comedy is not about appearance; it's about rockin' a mike. Are they laughing? That's the only test.

I was once doing a gig with Tim Vine; he was backstage, and there was one of those long strings of polystyrene coffee cups. He picked up the whole stack of about 20, walked on stage and then said: 'Bloody hell this coffee's hot!' which I think is the funniest thing anyone has ever said.

I'm traveling the world, ripping rooms apart with my stupendous comedy.

With comedians, you have that understanding that we're trying to get laughs.