Jen Kirkman Quotes

Sometimes they laugh at things I don't think are funny, but I believe if they're laughing at me, it's a good show.

People who go out and do hits year after year after year, I think the fans deserve more than that. The audiences deserve more than just that. You need to give them something new, or things you really love to sing. And they love it.

I'm glad that that era of stand-up is over, because I think it adversely affected a lot of people who could have been really, really great comedians. Because they unconsciously or subconsciously stifled their wild impulses, and were thinking about the five clean minutes for The Tonight Show, or the 20-minute sitcom pitch as a stand-up act.

I think that if you, as a comedian, are trying to be in people's face, then you've got to come up with new stuff every year. We're in a mass consumption phase where people take things for granted and want things to be instant when these are not things that can be instant.

Like I say, it depends on how you do rock-'n'-roll. If you do it right then I think people will appreciate it for what it is.

I think the hard thing for young comedians is that the majority of the young people in the audience out there don't have the wide range of references.

I don't want people to feel: "Why am I watching this? It's sick and sadistic." I want people to watch and think it's scary but they can't wait to see what happens next. I also wanted to make a movie that was watchable.

We live in a time where improv is king and people love improv, and I think there's a time and a place for that and people who are really good at structuring improv.

At the time, I used to say, "We should market this like Everybody Loves Raymond. It's just a guy dealing with his family." Instead, it was irresistible to show all these funny people. So, I actually think this could be more inviting to a new audience because they can just watch one character, find out what's going on in his life, and then meet another character and find out what's going on in her life, and then see how it intersects the other one.

I think people who make movies and have invested a lot of money in them, get frightened that if they challenge an audience they are going to repel them. And I think the opposite it's really true. It takes confidence and courage to know that and then commit to it.

I think sometimes maybe you're going to connect with the audience more than others, but the journey is about getting all there is to get out of this group of people.

TV's not the same buzz. If someone tells you three million people watched the show last week, that's good but, when you walk out in front of 1,000, you think, 'Oh my God, this had better be good'.

I think when it comes to television as opposed to film, the producers really are the writers. We work with people who are purely financial producers.

You're encouraging a response in citizens and the public, that has nothing to do with an informed decision, that has nothing to do with policy, that has nothing to do with any of that but that just kind of turns it into a competition they're watching as if they're watching the Preakness or the Belmont Stakes and I think if we want people to make more cool-headed, sober-minded decisions covering elections as horse races is the antithesis of doing that.

I think people get too comfortable, in just doing what they do every week. And I'm all about challenge and change, and I like to read the audience.

My preference is live performance. Because you get the feedback. There's an energy. It's live theater. That's why I think actors like that. You know, musicians need it, comedians definitely need it. It doesn't matter what size and what club, whether it's 30 people in the club or 2,000 in a hall or a theater. It's live, it's symbiotic, you need it.

People look at me as some bruiser, but I want to entertain people. I want people to applaud. I want to be the cause of people being happy, their emotions changing, to tell me I did a good performance.

It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.

I knew that we had an obligation and that was to keep an energy in it and try to keep the audience interested. In fact, I asked some of the actors to take a look at His Girl Friday, a Howard Hawks film with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, because they talk over each other and there's a great energy.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

I'm concerned that the world is a mess. That's why when I wrote my last book, Let's Face It, I dedicated it to the younger generation because, let's face it, the world is in a mess. Right now, the young people will inherit that mess. I think we have to do everything we can.

If people are willing to buy it and listen to it and they like it and enjoy it, then it's viable.

I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems

How am I influencing so many people on this stage rather than influencing the ones that I have back home?

I just think it should be illegal to call someone fat on TV... Because why is humiliating people funny?