Eric Idle Quotes

I do miss the rhythms of comedy. And I've never been able to perform very well without an audience. The sitcoms I've done had them. It was like doing a little play.

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.

When you're doing comedy on stage, it's great because you have the audience there and they're like another actor in the scene. You feed off of them, laugh. But in film when everyone's quiet, it's all about timing. But the key to that is to be authentic. Be in the moment, and if you play the moment truthfully, the humor will be there.

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

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

I think a theater show is a pure version of me doing my material. The theater crowd is a bit more polite, there really aren't hecklers, and there are a lot of people there to see me, and they're excited about the jokes and hanging out with me for a show.

Improvisation is almost like the retarded cousin in the comedy world. We've been trying forever to get improvisation on TV. It's just like stand-up. It's best when it's just left alone. It doesn't translate always on TV. It's best live.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

I do comedy shows. I make fun of myself, first of all.

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

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.

I had no desire to get up onstage and tell jokes. I prefer to stand next to really funny people.

Stand-up is still my job. That is the thing I wanted to get into when I was 21. You cannot beat the immediacy of it, making people laugh without any interruptions or edits.

More and more, I find that I love doing comedies; that instant gratification that you get on stage when they laugh at you feels really good.

People often tell me that they have no idea how I can do standup. The idea of trying to make a large group of strangers laugh is, for many, absolutely petrifying - and it is - but there are ways of gradually developing the material that can ease the fear.

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

Being onstage and performing, the high of that, and people coming to see you, and getting to make them laugh - that's what gets me hyped up. It's a nervous excitement.

To this day, to this very day, except for television, I've never had a writer. Anything I've ever done on the stage, happened on the stage and I developed it from there. It started doing impressions and jokes - which I did very poorly. To this day I can't tell a joke. That sounds nuts, but it's true. I exaggerate it and it becomes a joke. Everything I've ever done I've done out on the stage and it became a performance over many many years.

Ladies like improv stilts, and I think men like improv giant cocks. But one of the great things about improv is that you get to play some roles you'd never get to play otherwise, you know, like the old Italian pizza-maker who's passing on the business down to his son. You get to play it all when you improvise.

Stand-up is not something that you're good at right away. You have to do it a ton. But, I think I got to shave a year off because I didn't have to get over stage fright.

I'd love to do comedy. I'd probably have to get my laughing fits in check, because generally if I've done comedy, I'm usually the straight character that plays against the very obviously funny character, so that's really hard when the person is really hilarious.

I'm very lucky in that I've gotten to do a lot of things. But if you ever put a gun to my head and said, "You can only do one," I'd think it would be stand-up. I think it's the coolest job in the world.

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.

When you improvise on the spot, people are very reluctant to have soft moments or quiet moments or sad moments because they're trying to fill up the spaces. So they always go towards, "How come you're late?! You're supposed to have my shirt ready! You call this a dry cleaner?!" That's what happens. That's why improvising on the spot gets very dicey.

I found doing that kind of comedy without an audience is just... for me, it's almost impossible. You need the audience to do their half of the work.