Mitch Hedberg Quotes

Regardless of what I do, whether I write a book or whether I act or whether I host, I'll always do stand-up comedy because those moments, that's what I crave. If I do something funny, and I hear a crowd laugh in that moment, we're all sharing the exact same experience and the exact same feeling.

Sometimes it's cool to have banter with the audience. Occasionally, somebody will say something, and I'll say something right back, and everybody laughs, and it's funny.

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.

There are jokes I know I want to tell, and there's sort of a rough order, but usually I try to change it up every show, to improvise and talk with the audience. I think when you tell jokes, if you're not careful, you can end up telling the whole list of jokes and then that's it. And that can get a little boring.

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

Billy Crystal knows how to make people laugh. He's got 30 years on stage... there's no telling him what's funny.

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.

I just feed off the energy of the audience.

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

Patrice O'Neal is the best comic I ever saw.

I do comedy shows. I make fun of myself, first of all.

Kind of the exhausting thing about doing pure comedy, or something that's broader, is you're kind of a slave to the laugh. If it's not funny, then there's not much point in doing it. The kind of ueber-objective is to make people laugh. You always have to have that in the back of your mind, 'Eh, I've got to figure out a way to make this funny.'

When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.

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.

Stand-up and sketch and improv - that's the most direct contact you can have with somebody, making them laugh. I like that. I like the intimacy.

I feed off the audience a lot, their energy.

It's hard not to be affected by the live audience.

I see the audience as the final collaborator. I think it's kind of bullshit when people say, "I'm not interested in the audience reaction." I'm like, "Then why do you do theater? You can write a book, then you don't have to see how the audience reacts." It's a living, breathing thing.

The idea of surprise is part of what makes something funny, or what gets a reaction. At least when I'm an audience member, after you hear a joke so many times it's not as funny because it loses its surprise or its twist. So I think funny has to do with surprise.

Performing comedy, you develop a rhythm of ideas and laughs. I live for it.

I learned as a young man that I don't write jokes, but that I can deliver more mundane material and get a laugh. I call myself a humorist.

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 am a guy who talks about bacon and escalators. Stand-up comedy is very much a conversation. It's very personal, stylistically.

I think, as a comedian, the funniest you can be is with people you know, and [whom] you've known for years, in a pub. That's as funny as you get, and so the aim [while stand-up] is to get that funny on stage with 5,000 strangers, to get that funny in a room where people shouldn't be listening but they are.