Mae Martin Quotes

I am not interested in entertaining people. I think being an actor provides an opportunity to give people an experience they can connect to, reflect on, learn from, laugh at.

You write what makes you laugh, and you hope that the audience agree, and so far they do.

I think, you know, a lot of the business of comedy is taking your personal experiences and making them relatable to other people.

If all you have is satire, your show will close. Even if all you have is comedy, your show will close. The hardest thing is not making people laugh: the hardest thing is building an emotional story. Any child can make a group of adults laugh.

What I'm doing in the work I do, I prefer not to just have a series of jokes. It's nice when audiences can connect with the characters as well.

Comedians who aren't screenwriters are telling jokes that they themselves think are funny. They're expressing their own view of what they think funny is.

At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.

I never think in terms of target audience. I try to write what makes me laugh, so I'm the target audience. I guess I just hope there's another person in America like me.

I always was a writer, but then I wanted to do stand-up because I thought that was a way that I could perform what I wrote.

Part of my writing style can be attributed to my mother's impatience with comedy, because whenever I told her a story she would say, 'Yeah, yeah, just tell me: is it good for you or bad for you?' Consequently, I think, I was always afraid to indulge in the time that you need to tell a joke, very nervous about anything that constituted an Act II.

I have no idea what my best material is. Different people like different things. I'll say this: The political stuff gets the press, but the relationship jokes sell all the seats.

I've yet to write a stand-up show that isn't autobiographical.

A life being enacted onstage is a thing of utter fascination for me. And acting, it may begin out of vanity, but you hope that it's taken over by something else. I hope I've climbed over the vanity hurdle.

People don't understand how much time and work it takes to make somebody laugh, and how hard it is to write a script, to put together the story, the characters. When everyone laughs simultaneously, there's no greater feeling.

'Cheers' was a good first step because I got to write my own material.

I was fascinated by all of it. The sounds of the theater and the audience, their rapture when a play took over and moved them and held them quietly... When the audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in a communion because they were learning the truth about themselves.

I got into stand-up because I love stand-up. Specifically in stand-up, I love jokes. I love short, structured ideas and a punch line.

If I tried to do comedy for the rest of my career, I would not be very successful.

I look around and pay attention to what around me is not being talked about, and then I talk about it with as much humour and honesty as I can. All my books have been that way.

I prefer to tell stories. If it's funny, then I want to do it on stage.

I'm not a great writer of literature. I'm an entertainer.

'Spiderwoman' was wonderful. I think that show is a very important piece of theatre.

If I had to write long-form stuff with descriptions of rooms, it would be so boring for me. I like writing dialogue and jokes and situational stuff.

I want to know why people are getting laughs. Why this joke works and why that one didn't work. It all comes back to helping me be a better WWE Superstar. So I love it.

That's what's great about standup comedy: the instant feedback. You get up on stage, you tell a joke, if it doesn't work, come back the next day with a better version of it.