David Sedaris Quotes

I think if you can get people to laugh, you can get people to listen.

I'm always trying to make myself laugh. I'm the most enthusiastic audience I'm likely to find, so if it doesn't make me smile then it probably won't work on you. The jokes that only make me shrug get cut.

If you don't get feedback from your performers and your audience, you're going to be working in a vacuum.

I love improv so much. Listening. I think that's the key. When you improvise, you put a lot of pressure on yourself to create, and to be generating information, and trying to be funny, but if you just listen to what's being said to you, and then react honestly, you generally get better results.

The minute you make people laugh, you get them to listen.

When you have an entire amphitheatre of people laughing that way, it makes you feel so funny and it frees you to go further than you probably would.

I try to make the majority of my audience laugh.

I'm a great audience myself. I tried to keep in the background while others were on, but sometimes I'd just get hysterical.

I'd rather try and cram in another two gags than leave a pause to say, 'Hey, wasn't that bit funny?'

Your audience teaches you how to be funny.

If people do not laugh it's not comedy.

Comedy is a very approval-oriented field.

Here's the thing, with comedy - and I learned this from Will Ferrell - you can't be ashamed. If you're doing comedy, you have to fully commit to the joke. Shame is not part of it. If you act shy or uncomfortable about your body, that makes the audience shy and uncomfortable. And in a comedy you just want them to loosen up and laugh.

Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.

It is more difficult to keep the attention of hearers than of readers.

You have to make them laugh and then make them listen.

People go to YouTube to laugh, and as a YouTuber, your job is to figure out a niche and feed people what they want to see. Now that I know what kind of stuff people want to see, then I will keep going down that road and creating videos that are going to make people laugh.

I've been approached after shows from people who said, 'I don't agree with anything you said, but I laughed the whole way through.' That's still a little strange to me. Like, nothing, really? But at the same time, that's what happens in a conversation.

I was a little shocked at how adult some of the humor was, because I was never that into animation before and when I watched 'Shrek' I really laughed out loud.

Acting is reacting. You can't react if you're not paying attention, if you're not listening.

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

The violence or the vaudeville style of comedy is a technique all by itself. You get up there, and you are a comedian, and you're doing one thing. That is, you're going to make the audience laugh.

I took a public speaking class in college and managed to make the class laugh a little bit.

The key to acting has much more to do with listening than with talking.

If you are a great dramatic actor then you often don't know if people are enjoying your stuff at all because they are sitting there in silence. But with comedy it's a simple premise. If it's funny, people laugh. If it's not, they don't.