John Mulaney Quotes

I think it's great training for any comedian to start on cows. Because with cows, you expect them to be bored and just stare at you blankly. And that's exactly what you'll get at a comedy club. If you can toughen up with a cow audience, then you'll never be worried with a human audience.

When you do a song new live on stage, it's kind of a bit weird until it gets worn in, you know, like oiled up a bit. It's still a little bit stiff until you really thrashed at it for a few weeks.

I could never do stand-up because it's that thing of having to get up on stage. And out of every 10 jokes you tell, nine of them have to get a really good response.

The whole experience of doing a sitcom is... Telling jokes with such precision is really exciting, but it's also terrifying.

I think after coming off of 'American Idol'... people kind of expect you to just be awesome all the time, and we're still learning. I had a lot of stage experience, but it was in a 200-seat theater, you know - it wasn't thousands of people in front of me.

It's always challenging to go into a role.

I always have the same thing - which is the fear of not getting a laugh - that I've had from the time I was a kid; obsessing over, 'This joke doesn't quite work, we've got to get this right.' I was always like that, whether I was a member of a six-person ensemble or whether I'm the center of a show.

Bad improv happens with people who are inexperienced with each other and don't know the craft that well. But bad stand-up is something that could happen to someone at any level in their career.

For myself, the way that I learned comedy was doing it live for four years, and only after doing sketch for four years did I feel confident enough to be like, 'Okay, I feel good about starting to put stuff on the Internet where it lives forever.' As opposed to one time at a college sketch show where it bombs and we never speak of it again.

The only way to stay sharp is to do live shows. There is no part-time comedy.

I can't claim to ever have done stand-up.

Being a growing entertainer, period, you're going to always have struggles. I'm still trying to learn how to even perform right onstage.

The hardest part of comedy is writing the jokes, and the second-hardest part is telling the jokes. To me, everything else is significantly easier.

It's tough to do comedy. After 'Mister', my inhibitions with respect to comedy have come down.

Before I started doing standup, I knew that I had what it takes to develop an act. I went down to clubs with not many people there, and I just worked on it, man. A lot of my friends are comedians, so that part had a lot of encouragement, even though the shows were very caveman-like.

Getting to prove yourself in a room that's not your typical demo is an experience every comic should try. It makes you better.

I loved the idea that I could write a joke and someone else would have to take the risk of performing it.

Nothing is set up like a comedy bit. I did sitcoms for 10 years. Literally from 1989 to 1999. That's almost all I did. Whenever I got away from television I was like, "Phew, thank God that's over. I am never going back."

Every joke is an experiment. When you sit, alone, and write a script, or just a joke, you really have no idea if it will succeed.

I do lots of crowd work in my set, because I enjoy writing material through riffing and conversation.

In the U.K. I'm probably better known as a comedy writer - or certainly that's my background is in writing comedy.

Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer.

What people who don't write don't understand is that they think you make up the line consciously — but you don't. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it's the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don't think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I've said. And I laugh at it, because I'm hearing it for the first time myself.

I find broadcast intensely stressful, to the extent that perversely, I've never seen anything I've written actually broadcast on television. So, the audience response is something which I became aware of gradually.

It's a sick thing, right: people are afraid of public speaking. I do public speaking, except my public speaking involves the audience only having one type of emotion and one type of reaction. If they have anything other than laughter, it's a failure. That's an absurd thing for a human to try to seek. The main thing to realize is that whatever I say, it's my truth and I believe in it, and if I don't get a laugh off that, then it's not working.