Dave Attell Quotes

When I watch a comedy that's just hitting you over the head with jokes constantly, some really hit, but if they miss, you're like, 'Eh.'

An artist shouldn't be judged by how many people like his art but by how pure and good it is - but I think that when you're telling jokes, which is more what I'm doing, if people aren't laughing, you're telling bad jokes.

The bigger the audience, the better with comedy.

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

If a comedian tells a joke that you find funny, you laugh. If he tells a joke you do not find funny, don't laugh. Or you could possibly go as far as groaning or rolling your eyes. Then you wait for his next joke; if that's funny, then you laugh. If it's not, you don't laugh - or at very worst, you can leave quietly.

There's a guy in the audience with a distinctive laugh. I hope that guy is miked. The only problem with having a distinctive laugh is I know exactly when that guy isn't laughing. "Oh, distinctive laugh doesn't think that joke was funny!"

How do you know you told a good punch line, a good joke? It's because they laugh. How do you know you've got a good scary punch line? It's because they jump out of the seat or scream. So the best reward is one you can listen to.

It's pretty easy to hear what people are physically responding to versus what's just flat as a pancake in the room when it comes to jokes.

I'm always trying to make myself laugh. I'm the most enthusiastic audience I'm likely to find, so if it doesn't make me smile then it probably won't work on you. The jokes that only make me shrug get cut.

The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

I don't mind a crowd's not laughing; it's the groans that slow down the show.

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.

You can't make people laugh for more than half an hour and be consistent.

A stand-up comedian faces the audiences and gets their immediate feedback. I hide behind the comic strip, and unless people write to me, I don't know what they think.

But television, when I was doing it, was all about scoring. You had to make these jokes bang, do whatever you could to make the material really pop. And if it didn't, there was something wrong with the material, or with you.

When I'm playing comedy, I never do 'jokes.' Sometimes I'll deliver a line in a way I think is more likely to get a laugh, but all the best comedy is played straight. What's funny is the way it hits the world around it or the way it hits the other characters.

As a director, you can't stop a guy if he thinks something's hysterical, because if you do, then he'll get depressed because he thinks he didn't come up with a good joke. So if a guy's going on some run and it's killing him, and he thinks it's hilarious, you gotta do enough so that he thinks you can use it in the movie.

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.

We don't have a laugh track, which helped Seinfeld a lot, and did kind of tell people when to laugh. It just made it a lot easier. Our show doesn't have that, so it's hard for Middle America to catch on.

Any audience that gets a laugh out of me gets it while I'm facing them.

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.

I'm not the comedy police, but you watch a movie, and everyone's laughing, and then you shake it out, and you realize, 'There's no joke there!'

Transforming a line like that makes it into a belly laugh instead of a laugh against us.

But with comedy it's a simple premise. If it's funny, people laugh. If it's not, they don't.

The jokes are great but what really matters for a comedian is his performance, his whole attitude, and the laughs that he gets between the jokes rather than on top of the jokes.