Willie Geist Quotes

When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.

Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.

When you're doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.

Comedy is not something that a person can fake or learn how to do.

I was the kid who always hung back and then dropped the jokes when you least expected it. Timing was everything. My mouth sort of developed over time.

I was not influenced by Jack Benny, and people have remarked on my timing and Jack's timing, but I don't think you can teach timing. It's something you hear in your head.

Something about not waiting for the laugh of a laugh track allows you to take lines that otherwise might be seen as just direct jokes, and make them seem realistic.

With silly stuff, it's seventy-five percent confidence. I always tell people that it's because I'm nervous about getting that next laugh and I need to hear it. I always want to condense a joke.

I think so. I can't think of anything that requires more finesse than comedy, both from a verbal and visual point of view.

At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.

When you're a standup comic, you get up and you try stuff, and you're always kind of seeing how far you can push things.

When you have a writing partner and you're writing a comedy, your goal is to make each other laugh.

I think everyone's different but in comedy, I try to do my scene to make the director and the other actors laugh. If I can make them laugh and we have the same sensibility, then I'm on the right page.

A lot of the time, you're supposed to play to the top of your intelligence, as truthful as possible. But when you're on stage making people laugh, you're still acting. I think it helped me a bunch to go on stage two or three times a week.

I've never considered stand-up. Luckily I'm given great lines to say. I'm not sure how great my timing would be if I actually had to come up with my own jokes.

To be perfectly honest, drama is a lot simpler than comedy.

For my stand-up, I always have my notebook with me and if something strikes me, I'll write it down.

Drama is easy. Comedy's hard.

Rehearsals are for gags.

I have the improv background, but stand-up is different.

I am not so secretly a comedian. I write a lot of my own material if you've seen videos I've done. I write jokes.

I'm very interested in any script that makes me laugh.

Tina Fey is a genius - I've seen it with my own eyes now. She's a very observant person, and I've never seen somebody write such a high volume or as quickly as she does.

Twitter is a good medium to lean how to write jokes. It pushes you to write a better joke in that, on Twitter, the first joke about something has already happened. You need to think of the second joke and the third joke.

I just realized at a certain point that no matter how much writing I did, I'm still a gym rat for comedy clubs.