Chris Pratt Quotes

There is nothing more joyful to me than hearing a live audience laugh. Especially when I planned it that way!

Comedy can be more difficult than drama. It requires more attention to timing. In the theater, you're always dependent on the audience for the energy, but in comedy the feedback you get is more important. You can judge by the quickness and the length of the laugh just where you stand with the audience.

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

It doesn't matter what you feel - ultimately, it's what the audience feels. You can finish a scene and think to yourself, 'Oh, God. I was so deep in that moment,' and find it just didn't play. I don't know if I have very good radar about that or not.

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

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.

Silences are the most underrated part of comedy.

When you're doing stand-up, you can comment if something fails, get a laugh from that.

The greatest comedian I've ever seen is Jack Benny. He wasn't afraid of the silences.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

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.

With comedy, it's really hard to tell if something's working on the page - you really need the actors to bring it alive. The scariest part is if people will laugh or not.

From the stage I've seen people of all ages absolutely roaring at really good toilet humour.

As a comedian, I don't know if they're laughing because it's funny or if they're laughing at me because I'm not funny. And I'm thinking, 'Who cares? They're laughing.' If you go on stage, and they're laughing at you full-on for 60 minutes? You know, whatever puts them in the seats.

I've experienced plenty of times when something I think is funny doesn't do very well. And there are times when something I don't think is funny makes the audience laugh so hard.

The basic function of a comic is stand-up because it's so straightforward and simple. If the audience don't laugh, you didn't do your job. I've had some audiences where I didn't care if they laughed or not because they were either too drunk or stupid.

As you get older as a comedian and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.

Stand-up comedy is a sickness. Who wouldn't want a room full of people laughing and screaming at you just because of who you are? Nothing is as good, except maybe having a baby.

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

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.

I think that comedy really tells you how it is. The other thing about comedy is that - you don't even know if you're failing in drama, but you do know when you're failing in comedy. When you go to a comedy and you don't hear anybody laughing, you know that you've failed.

Doing drama is, in a sense, easier. In doing comedy, if you don't get that laugh, there's something wrong.

I enjoy the character interplay. Sometimes the audience is not laughing, but smiling, and that is almost just as good because it keeps them ready to laugh.

I never leave a piece of theater that I love and say, 'That was a good point; They made a good point.' I leave, and I feel something.

Just because you're laughing, it doesn't mean the audience will, necessarily.