Matt Besser Quotes

The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it... try to fake three laughs in an hour - ha ha ha ha ha - they'll take you away, man. You can't.

With stand-up, it doesn't matter who you are. If the audience claps because they love your movies, that clapping stops after five seconds, and then it's your job to make them laugh.

I was the kid who liked making other people laugh, so maybe the comedy came before the acting.

My job is mostly to entertain and be funny.

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn't love them.

I wanted to make a living, but I really was not interested in money at all. I was interested in being a great comedian.

I just like doing standup, that's all I'm interested in or good at.

I never thought I'd do comedy, ever, in a million years. I always thought comedy was just for fun - to me, the real stuff was the real dramatic stuff. Now I know it's all valuable. There's a real excitement, a good feeling when you can make people laugh.

To spoon-feed people their comedy is not the proper evolution of the art.

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.

I still love to walk on stage and make people laugh, and I work very, very hard at it, and I take it seriously.

I think you develop strong instincts when you're a comedian. You have to pay your bills by making people laugh every six seconds... or not. I had to do that for 22 years.

Before I started doing standup, I knew that I had what it takes to develop an act. I went down to clubs with not many people there, and I just worked on it, man. A lot of my friends are comedians, so that part had a lot of encouragement, even though the shows were very caveman-like.

I continue to do standup because there's a connection with a live audience - there are skills that you do learn as a standup comedian that help you on a set.

Black audiences are probably the toughest for me to make laugh. I've gotten pretty good at performing for them, but it's still a challenge.

Ah, 'Kismet,' or Carry On Camel, as we called it. I thought the show was shocking. It was the worst designed production ever but it's got a fantastic score. It's not an awfully good book though. You really have to work hard to eke out any laughs from that script.

Comedy actually is quite difficult to do. The timing, the tone, the delivery, and the precise expressions are all very crucial, especially for actresses, because we are not given the author-backed punches.

In television, there are so many things between you making a joke and the audience seeing it. It's like an assault course.

I did so many open mics. I would write jokes on Twitter constantly, and then slowly, over time, open mics turned into shows. If you can get a joke to work at an open mic, it's a good joke.

I really love standup, and I really love writing standup.

I love doing standup, but I love watching it more. Watching people like Michelle Buteau or Baron Vaughn get up and do their thing - that is what comedy can be like.

I know I'm going to be doing standup for the rest of my life.

It wasn't so much figuring out my voice comedically, because that was always pretty clear. It was more about performing and being a good, watchable performer.

The fans are the motivators that keep me creating my style of content.

For other comics, it's about full-spectrum dominance, being on panel shows and having one-liners and being a good chat show guest and having a good seven minutes you can do on 'Live At The Apollo.' But I really think about these subsequent finished pieces, you know? And they don't always chop up well into one-liners and routines.