Poppy Z. Brite Quotes

I don't know if my sense of humor goes over Americans' heads.

Regardless of what I do, whether I write a book or whether I act or whether I host, I'll always do stand-up comedy because those moments, that's what I crave. If I do something funny, and I hear a crowd laugh in that moment, we're all sharing the exact same experience and the exact same feeling.

I don't know if you know you're funny, but you enjoy being funny. I know I'm funny because people tell me I am, but when I watch myself, it doesn't make me laugh. Does that make sense? Because I know the jokes, and to me, I feel like I'm pulling the wool over people's eyes. And there are probably people who do not enjoy what I do.

Sometimes when I do a joke and it doesn't get a lot of laughs, it kind of feels like I'm doing jazz. That's kinda cool because jazz is cool, but sometimes jazz sucks ... Maybe I'm the Kenny G of comedy.

I write things in my house, and hopefully there's a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that's very different than a performer on stage, where there's an immediate dance with the audience. It's incredibly powerful.

I think there's something really thrilling to having to get people laughing about something, and then, when you have them in that comfort space, you can drop the weight into the texture of the story.

Experience has shown me that standing by oneself reading from one's book isn't especially compelling - unless you're David Sedaris.

In fifth grade, we had to write a story and read it in front of the class. When I read mine out, the class were just belly laughing. And I remember being like, 'This is the coolest!' So I want to dedicate my life to trying to make people laugh. I can't imagine doing anything else.

When I got on Stern I realized that this was the one job where you could be really honest and open, almost like Richard Pryor or something. You can be honest about your life and get laughs.

The scariest thing about screening a comedy... if you screen a drama, you know, there's no real way to tell in real time if people are enjoying it or not. But in a comedy, it's like, if people aren't laughing, it's sort of scary.

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

I heard David Sedaris read live recently which was a complete delight. Few writers make me laugh out loud on the bus. He does.

I have seen and heard comedians who had really funny 'stuff' but yet could not make the people laugh; then, again - I have seen others whose stuff was anything but humorous, and the audience would howl with laughter.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

I'm not an artist. I tell inappropriate stories and jokes and I try to make people laugh.

What I've always done as an entertainer is try to come up with things that people will find interesting, or compelling, or humorous.

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

I remember once having to stop performing when I thought an elderly man a few rows back from the front was actually going to die because he was laughing so hard.

It's always good to take something that's happened in your life and make something of it comedically.

I just love doing radio. I've learned to be more vulnerable through radio than even I've been through books and writing lyrics. It's a different type of experience where, if I'm writing a lyric, I can sort of hide behind it a little bit.

As a comedian, I don't know if they're laughing because it's funny or if they're laughing at me because I'm not funny. And I'm thinking, 'Who cares? They're laughing.' If you go on stage, and they're laughing at you full-on for 60 minutes? You know, whatever puts them in the seats.

I like the purity of stand-up because it is all about whether people laugh at your jokes. Either they laugh or they don't.

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.

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

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