Jon Richardson Quotes

I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.

I think it's fun to play for people who don't know what you do.

There's nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night.

If I see someone out there mouthing the words to a bit, I'm not having fun.

Doing my Broadway show '700 Sundays' reminded me how much I love working in front of an audience.

In our show we know, if we're not getting a response, you see it in our face... we either do something to get a laugh, or the audience is in on it with us.

I just love engaging a live audience - I love that.

There's a lot of audience participation in 'Rock of Ages' and 'Rocky Horror.'

I joined a drama group when I was eight. It was the first time I'd made the connection with an audience.

I play some places where the people are right at my feet, and you can see their expressions. It's kind of more like playing in your living room. It's almost easier to play in front of thousands of people in an arena scene, in some ways, but you don't get the personal contact.

Every single performance of 'Fleabag,' I would learn so much from the audience reaction or how you could change it all the time, and I loved that sense that the performance is ever-growing and changing and could be affected by the audience.

We spent night after night out there learning the art of entertaining a crowd.

At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is like acting when the audience are the other characters that I'm acting with.

One of the things about crowd work that's so exciting is when you discover a character in the audience who's interesting or funny, who you can vibe off of. If someone's got a weird job that you can make reference to throughout, or you can bring that person onstage - humiliate them, or celebrate them! You can put people in conversation with one another. The best is when something that they're doing can reflect back on something that you're doing.

I just want my music to involve an audience in what's taking place onscreen.

When I am on the opera stage, I am playing someone else. In recitals, I even have the chance to talk to the audience, which is something you don't get to do in opera.

The toughest thing for me is doing on-camera stuff as a comedian.

Just to talk in front of people is scary. And now you gotta learn how to be funny, and now you gotta learn how to make people laugh at what you think is funny. That's not easy.

Playing live is really the art form. You're a lot freer, a lot looser. You've got people there that can give you feedback, and then you can play off of that. There's so much more energy.

Some guys like myself, we like to play off the crowd.

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.

When you have a great audience, you can just keep going and finding new things.

This is what I love to do. I love to perform for people that get it or just want something interesting.

I always do that at the end of shows, like a Q&A session. First of all it lets people know that this isn't some preprogrammed, press-play show where I have to say the exact same words in the exact same order. That's part of the thing with live comedy is that people like the fun aspect of it and I enjoy the taking questions part.

The audience is not the least important actor in the play and if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces.