Doug Stanhope Quotes

To me, if you are in the same building with Peter Sellers or John Cleese, or any of those guys and holding your own making other people laugh, that's a compliment.

Nobody sets out to offend or shock for the sake of shocking. You set out to get laughs.

People walked out on Richard Pryor and he's the funniest man alive.

In general, comedians are attracted to vice.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

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.

There is a cliche that probably has some anecdotal evidence on the side that comedians are very depressed people, but that's because no one is ever going to seem as funny in a normal conversation as compared to when they're up there onstage in the spotlight making a huge audience keel over with laughter.

I always was trying to make people laugh as a kid. I was a big fan of Carol Burnett and Gilda Radner. I watched them and I remember feeling as a child, when I heard the laughter they got, a little jealous that they made someone laugh like that.

If I make fun of somebody at my show, believe me, it's something we can all laugh at.

We want to get people laughing; we don't want to offend anybody.

More and more, I find that I love doing comedies; that instant gratification that you get on stage when they laugh at you feels really good.

Audiences want comedy that has no venom. They want to have a laugh without it becoming twee.

Anybody can go onstage and be dirty. You have to be funny, that's the key. You can say anything as long as it's funny. You can't take it too seriously up there. And people coming to see you can't take it too seriously.

From my experience working with comedians, there is that competitive aspect. With actors, for instance, they don't want to look competitive even if they are, whereas comedians, I think, are openly happy to play on the idea that they all compete with each other to get the laughs. There's something about comedy, I think, that encourages that. There's this kind of schoolboy sense of wanting to top the other person that we play off of to show them competing for who's smarter or cleverer.

I remember doing a lot of comedy. I always loved that feeling when you do something on stage and you can feel the vibe of the audience turn, and they start laughing. It's how you know something's not right, and how to fix it, or how to make the moment stronger or funnier.

I had always been heavily influenced by stand-up.

I think the job of a comedian is to make people laugh, but also challenge them to laugh at things they didn't know they could until now.

The whole thing about working in front of the camera is to make people laugh when they're not supposed to.

Once you do a joke and it works it's only good for so long, like shooting fish in a barrel.

I'm much more interested in making people laugh than getting applause breaks.

There aren't many laughs in that and I remember doing a look and everybody laughed and I just thought, wow, that's incredible how you can do that. So I did another look and they laughed again and then I remember thinking, hold on, this isn't right for this piece, you've got to stop it.

I took a public speaking class in college and managed to make the class laugh a little bit.

If you are a great dramatic actor then you often don't know if people are enjoying your stuff at all because they are sitting there in silence. But with comedy it's a simple premise. If it's funny, people laugh. If it's not, they don't.

At the end of the day, even if my part is a bit goofy, the key thing is that I'm doing what I love to do, and that's to make people laugh.

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