Drew Carey Quotes

TV is easier: it's all planned out for you and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over.

I'm a frustrated stand-up comic. If you hand me a microphone and I get one laugh, then I'll go on for 20 minutes.

As a comedian, I'm forced to have a tough skin. Until people laugh, they are detractors. You walk into a new audience where nobody knows you, they go: 'Make us laugh. Show us what you're made of. Prove why we should be listening to you.'

We as comics do want an immediate response from the audience. It's really quiet on the set, and there are only the producers, and the director, so a comic is looking for someone to give a reaction, even if it is the camera guy.

Doing stand-up takes the fun out of being funny.

The audience changes every night. You're the same person. You have to speak your mind and do the stuff that you think is funny and makes you laugh.

Before doing my first open mic, I was sitting in the back watching all these comedians banter back and forth and fire jokes and up each other, and I thought, 'This is where I wanna be.'

The only way to stay sharp is to do live shows. There is no part-time comedy.

I think it's great training for any comedian to start on cows. Because with cows, you expect them to be bored and just stare at you blankly. And that's exactly what you'll get at a comedy club. If you can toughen up with a cow audience, then you'll never be worried with a human audience.

You say a line and you wait for them to laugh, then you say another line and you wait... It felt weird to me. But it's interesting and the energy is almost like theatre, I suppose, with all the people there.

I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it's a doddle because you've got an audience.

I could never do stand-up because it's that thing of having to get up on stage. And out of every 10 jokes you tell, nine of them have to get a really good response.

With stand-up, it doesn't matter who you are. If the audience claps because they love your movies, that clapping stops after five seconds, and then it's your job to make them laugh.

When you're a stand-up, you play in front of 600 people, and it's all about timing. I could never do stand-up comedy; it would be way too hard for me.

I've just seen really, really funny guys, and if I didn't know them, I wouldn't know they were funny from the television. I don't know what it does, it just sucks it away.

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

I have to visualise my jokes, live my jokes, feel the audience because every audience is different. It's like having a different dancing partner every night.

The only thing I miss from the sitcom format is that immediate gratification of when you're, if we're talking about comedy, of the live audience.

When I began doing stand-up, it took me a long time to get an hour's worth of material together.

I think the challenge is going out in front of a paying audience with absolutely nothing and trying to entertain them for two hours. Thankfully, I only think about that right before we go on, and then once we're out there, everything's fine.

Bad improv happens with people who are inexperienced with each other and don't know the craft that well. But bad stand-up is something that could happen to someone at any level in their career.

Impressions are still kind of hard for me and not what I love to do the most, but with characters, I think there's an element of fearlessness. You try to figure out the best reading and wording of the jokes before the show, and then you just really have to go hard.

Being able to write jokes is great, but you still have to get used to performing them and being on stage - and enjoying being on stage, not just like tolerating it.

What I really like about stand-up is there's 100 people in a room, and you can just feel the pulse. It's very human.

In the U.K. and Ireland, crowd-work is a big thing. It shows you how funny someone would be if you met them off-stage. Americans don't care if you're funny off-stage. They want to see the writing; they want to see the work you did.