Jim Varney Quotes

With stand-up you've just got that one chance. Audiences can be quite fickle.

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.

When you're going for a joke, you're stuck out there if it doesn't work. There's nowhere to go. You've done the drum role and the cymbal clash and you're out on the end of the plank.

I did my first set at a talent show, and I couldn't finish because the judges didn't like my jokes. They were 'offensive.'

Having to stand in front of an audience and have it be your job to make them laugh, you can't really look to anyone but yourself. It's what you wrote, what you said and how you said it, so it's kind of terrifying, but I liked it. When it goes well, it's the best feeling in the world. When it doesn't go well, it's the worst feeling, but once you get into the rhythm of it, I think it's really fun.

With a live audience, it's very clear when you've pushed it too far to the edge - because you fall off that edge and hit bottom with a thud. Nothing abstract about that. You know you went too far when you hear that groan or worse - that silence instead of the big laugh you were expecting following your hilariously edgy joke.

You say a line and you wait for them to laugh, then you say another line and you wait... It felt weird to me. But it's interesting and the energy is almost like theatre, I suppose, with all the people there.

But I also know in standup, there's nowhere to hide. You get on stage and you deliver, or you are eviscerated and you are thrown into a pile of bodies at the bottom of a mountain.

I don't mind a crowd's not laughing; it's the groans that slow down the show.

The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to do a documentary on your life and you're watching it with an audience and there's not a laugh.

There is nothing - nothing - like writing a great joke and having that joke kill onstage.

Laughter is binary: It either happens or it doesn't. As each joke arrives in the course of a film, the cavernous space of the theater is either filled with joy and laughter or with the quiet of cringing embarrassment. Every time you step to the plate to make a joke, you're going to experience one or the other.

Stand-up is successful if they laugh. It's unsuccessful if they don't laugh.

In standup, the feedback is instantaneous, and if it fails, you know you'll be off-stage and hiding in a short time.

You can play a gig as a band and not know that they hated you; with standup, after every line, you know.

A joke bombing on stage doesn't bother me, especially if it's intended to bomb.

[sam] Kinison, when he started out, he'd come to Canada when I was first starting, and he'd always [bomb].

A comic says funny things. A comedian says things funny.

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

The key, I would say to any fledgling humorist starting out, is to make sure that sloppiness is part of your recipe. That way they come to expect fumbling and clumsiness and they say, "Oh, it must be a charming part of his personality."

The whole idea of comedy, there is nothing normal about going up on stage to make strangers laugh. But I'm also not an exhibitionist like other comics. I'm not up there talking about masturbating.

When anything doesn't hit with a huge laugh, as comics, it feels like, Oh no, oh no, we're sinking.

Thinking up jokes is easy. The hard part is trying them out on stage, because you never know if they're funny until you get there. Not one comedian in the world ever really knows.

I don't think I've ever died on stage. I've had jokes that died on stage. I've told a joke and absolutely nothing. They didn't know it was the end of the joke.

I remember thinking as I was doing the jokes for the first time, "If I can hear that very clearly, I'm not hearing laughter." It just became deafening, this buzzing noise. I mean, it was brutal. It was really terrible. Then I remember thinking, "At least nobody important, or anyone who I really respect, saw that." And then literally right when I went off the stage, Jerry Seinfeld got up and went on. So I was like, "Oh great. Seinfeld saw me bomb." On the other hand, I thought, "At least no one will be thinking of me anymore. They'll just be focusing on him."