Tim Heidecker Quotes

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.

In the Netherlands I read the first chapter of Exquisite Corpse to an audience that laughed in all the places I thought were funny - an experience I've never had in America!

For me, one of the biggest thrills is going to a theater and going, "Oh, I got a laugh!" Because you never quite get to hear it [otherwise].

In comedy, though, it's good to get feedback from the audience about what they find funny.

The thing that is incredibly helpful is that we screen the movies and we ask the audience if they like it or not and we ask a lot of questions and do testing on the movies. For comedies, at least, it's very helpful. If they're not laughing and they don't say that they loved it, then I have screwed up.

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

Before YouTube, I used to show videos at film festivals, and that was good and constructive. Watching things with an audience is a great way to gauge - it's pretty clear what's working in comedy when there's a joke and people laugh or don't laugh.

The audience is so important. Because there's something that I might think is super funny, but if it's just not getting the feedback, I have to let it go.

I'm the biggest proponent of test screenings now. There's two ways to face test screenings. For dramas, I don't know if I would rely on them as much, although I still think you need them, because you're making a movie for an audience at the end of the day. But with comedy... You could go through a script or anything I ever worked on, where you go, "This is hilarious," and you put it in front of people and you get nothing. And then the other side of it, is something you're like, "I think this is really stupid," and it gets a giant laugh.

When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working.

We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll- em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

I like test screenings. I like to see a movie with an audience of strangers. I think it tells you a lot.

I started to do a study on how not to do stand-up comedy. Yeah, it's lonely work. You die, you die alone. It's you, the light, and the audience. If you win, you win big. If you lose, you lose big time.

If I say a joke and the audience laughs it makes me feel good.

As a comedian, I don't know if they're laughing because it's funny or if they're laughing at me because I'm not funny. And I'm thinking, 'Who cares? They're laughing.' If you go on stage, and they're laughing at you full-on for 60 minutes? You know, whatever puts them in the seats.

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.

Comedy can be more difficult than drama. It requires more attention to timing. In the theater, you're always dependent on the audience for the energy, but in comedy the feedback you get is more important. You can judge by the quickness and the length of the laugh just where you stand with the audience.

If the laughter of the audience was malicious we wouldn't show it.

I never feel comfortable! I'm always anxious. I'm always all over the board. That said, I like doing comedy because it's easy to tell when you're getting it right because people laugh, and you can hear it, and they're smiling, and you can see it.

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

I don't know if you know you're funny, but you enjoy being funny. I know I'm funny because people tell me I am, but when I watch myself, it doesn't make me laugh. Does that make sense? Because I know the jokes, and to me, I feel like I'm pulling the wool over people's eyes. And there are probably people who do not enjoy what I do.

Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.

I enjoy the character interplay. Sometimes the audience is not laughing, but smiling, and that is almost just as good because it keeps them ready to laugh.

You never really know until you put the movie in front of an audience. I am a big advocate of screenings, which are getting harder and harder to do nowadays.

We get prompt feedback on social network. The overseas audience is quick to convey what they feel about a film and we realise whether we are up to date.