Gad Elmaleh Quotes

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.

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

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

When I was in third grade I taught myself ventriloquism... What's hard is to learn to be an entertainer and make people laugh. I was a few years out of college before I felt I had enough material. Then in 1988 I moved to L.A. and started to do some shows at comedy clubs.

Whenever I realize I'm being a goofball, I write it down. When I release the joke onstage, I love watching the effect it has on the audience. No one wants to see someone talk who takes themselves too seriously.

Not everyone can be as successful a performer as myself, who gave 10 great performances the first time I ever did comedy, and then toiled in obscurity for years.

It's funny, the hardest thing to do is to make something look like it's fast, loose and improvised, and get somebody to laugh.

When you're doing stand-up, you can comment if something fails, get a laugh from that.

And you can't hide in a comedy scene either. You have to give in to the scene and commit.

The violence or the vaudeville style of comedy is a technique all by itself. You get up there, and you are a comedian, and you're doing one thing. That is, you're going to make the audience laugh.

I really loved what I was doing being creative and being funny as a stand-up comedian.

My drama instructor suggested I try comedy. I was resistant at first because I considered myself a serious actor, but of course I fell in love with it.

My stand-up is quite good now, people say. It's just like a big conversation each time. Every gig is a rehearsal.

I'm not a comedian, but I love the comedians who know when to get off the stage.

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

But television, when I was doing it, was all about scoring. You had to make these jokes bang, do whatever you could to make the material really pop. And if it didn't, there was something wrong with the material, or with you.

Stand-up will always come first. I've been doing it for 22 years, and nothing compares to that connection you have with the audience. It's euphoric.

With silly stuff, it's seventy-five percent confidence. I always tell people that it's because I'm nervous about getting that next laugh and I need to hear it. I always want to condense a joke.

Stand-up comedy is the most relaxing thing I do. If I want to unwind and de-stress, I go out and do stand-up, often several shows in a night.

When you have an entire amphitheatre of people laughing that way, it makes you feel so funny and it frees you to go further than you probably would.

The basic function of a comic is stand-up because it's so straightforward and simple. If the audience don't laugh, you didn't do your job. I've had some audiences where I didn't care if they laughed or not because they were either too drunk or stupid.

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.

One time I happened to use the word 'denigrate' onstage, and it didn't get any reaction. So as I continued my act, the left side of my brain was fast-forwarding to see if I had any other big words coming up.

In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don't really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face.

You're at the top of your game if you do comedy.