Norman Lear Quotes

There is nothing more joyful to me than hearing a live audience laugh. Especially when I planned it that way!

With my work, I always want to people to just forget about anything stressful going on in their lives and be fully entertained. Laughter is key. If they shed a tear or go home thinking about the play, that's a bonus.

I believe in things that move people, if the audience isn't deeply caught up and moved to either laughter or tears then I don't think it is theater.

The best way to make your audience laugh is to start laughing yourself.

The most important thing for me as an actor playing a character is to make you laugh. That's my No. 1 goal.

If I get a hard audience they are not going to get away until they laugh. Those seven laughs a minute - I've got to have them.

When I was a little girl, the only real form of entertainment I was exposed to was theater, being raised in St. Louis, and I still love theater, and I think sitcoms are similar to that, in there's a live audience, and you know, I definitely like the comedy of it, too. I like to make people laugh, and I definitely think laughter is healing.

For me, the great joy is to watch an audience watching what I've made. To hear not a peep from the audience at the right moment, and then to hear the laughs and the cheers.

If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned laughter is cheating.

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.

I guess that is my favorite thing - to make people laugh and also to maybe engage them emotionally and touch them somehow in telling the story.

Sometimes there's one person in the audience laughing hysterically, and it's so much fun. You end up playing the entire play to them.

I love the theater as much as music, and the whole idea of getting across to an audience and making them laugh, making them cry - just making them feel - is paramount to me.

When you improvise, you work off the laughs from the audience, but when you step on stage to do standup, it's silent.

How can you get bored if the audience is cheering and laughing at something you're doing?

Everyone tells me I need to do comedy. It's never something that crossed my mind, but to be able to do a true comedy and make people laugh, that would be great.

I much prefer doing comedy. I get a little paranoid when the audience is not laughing.

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.

The hallmark of a good comedy is that it can make you laugh, but it can also take you to the point where you're in love with these characters, and you want to see them be happy, and you want to feel that emotion for them.

I think if you've got people on your side, if you've got people really laughing, you are able to make them cry.

When an audience is laughing with a character, they make themselves so vulnerable, and they open up. They expose their heart the moment they're laughing, because they're relaxed and they're disarmed.

Sometimes when I'm performing, whenever my puppet cracks a joke, it actually makes me laugh.

Humor is the secret into the audience's other ranges of emotions.

It's tricky: with comedy in any movie, you're hungry for an audience to embrace a movie and be a part of an experience that's comedic; it's the easier way to go in some ways.

If you can make an audience laugh, you can make them love any character.