Maria Bamford Quotes

The hardest thing in the world to depict dramatically is stand-up.

With a lot of comedians, one of their major attributes is that they look comedic, with a certain hangdog or manic expression. I look like the neighborhood bully. That doesn't elicit laughter.

Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience.

If you start to disrespect the character you're playing, or play it too much for laughs, that can work for a sketch, it will sell some gags, but it's all technique. It's like watching a juggler - you can be impressed by it, but it's not going to touch you in any way.

You spend so much time in the world of virtual that the actual - which nothing is more actual than stand-up - it's a painful experience for the audience, and the comedian a lot of time - we miss that.

The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

I never used to tell jokes on stage. Now I'm cutting up jokes all night long.

With a live audience, it's very clear when you've pushed it too far to the edge - because you fall off that edge and hit bottom with a thud. Nothing abstract about that. You know you went too far when you hear that groan or worse - that silence instead of the big laugh you were expecting following your hilariously edgy joke.

A good stand-up, you lead the audience. You don't kowtow to the audience. Sometimes the audience is wrong. I always think the audience is wrong.

You can't debate satire. Either you get it or you don't.

It's grueling never knowing if the audience is going to think you're funny. It's soul-destroying when they don't laugh.

Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.

When you're doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.

You can't just yell jokes at people.

Regardless of what kind of film, the number one rule of comedy is to never take yourself too seriously and then the next rule is you can't have any self-consciousness, otherwise it kills the laugh, and that will never change.

I was not influenced by Jack Benny, and people have remarked on my timing and Jack's timing, but I don't think you can teach timing. It's something you hear in your head.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

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.

I did stand-up. I loved George Carlin and Steve Martin.

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

I think the more the actor lets you know what he thinks of the character, the less the audience cares - like a comedian who laughs at his own jokes.

When you improvise, you work off the laughs from the audience, but when you step on stage to do standup, it's silent.

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

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

You know you're on stage being the life of the party and trying to get laughs, and then, in a lot of ways, you don't have anything to give once you give it to the people.