Steve Martin Quotes

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.

Your only guidepost is your own instinct and judicious editing. In my stand-up act I learned that in the first 10 minutes I could say anything and it would get a laugh. Then I'd better deliver. In the movie it's the same thing. You get a lot of laughs when people first sit down and then the story better kick in. Many years in front of an audience, I would hope, give me a sense of what works.

The thing with the comedian is you can make all the jokes you want and not every joke it going to be a winner, and not every joke is going to land, there'll be some that somebody doesn't laugh at, but that's just part of the deal.

When you go into a show, you pray it's successful, but you just don't know what's going to happen.

I believe that comedians do what they do, and then they get credit or criticism for doing it. There's nothing planned about this.

You can work on a movie for years, and you won't know until you show it to an audience for the first time if it makes any sense to them at all, if they're touched, if they find it funny, so it's endlessly exciting, because failure is just right there all the time, and your chances of success don't rise that much based on the fact that you succeeded last time.

You do some things and you just hope people will laugh.

Maybe during the last sprint, sometimes you can lose, sometimes you can gain.

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

The thing about stand-ups is you can't really get good unless you're failing in front of a large number of people. That makes stand-up comedy unique: you need a tremendous amount of reserve within you to take the rejection from the audience, and without it, you can't do anything.

But all actors go through the process, it's hit and miss, you have achievement and failure.

I enjoy stand-up because it has the biggest reward: instant gratification. You can hear the people laughing.

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

I never knew if I would get my own show, but I knew I loved stand-up.

What's great about stand-up is that you can say whatever you want and go around the country, and sometimes the world, and work on it and see how people react. You don't need Standards & Practices or notes from lawyers or producers to tell you what's funny.

Ultimately, I just decided stand-up comedy is a huge commitment, and if you want to be the best, you have to give it one hundred per cent.

The idea of trying to predict what people will or won't respond to is risky.

I just always loved stand-up. It's like magic. You say something, and a whole room full of people laughs together. Say something else, they laugh again. The fact that people come to see that and participate in that... I don't know, it's just like magic.

You can't predict a show, that is the damndest thing, you can't predict if a show is going to work or not until it's on the air.

The margin between success and drama is fractional.

The success of any stand-up act comes out of life experience.

You always want to have a winning car, but there is no guarantee that it will be.

Everyone tells me I need to do comedy. It's never something that crossed my mind, but to be able to do a true comedy and make people laugh, that would be great.

Live stand-up is my thing. I love being on stage and just messing around.

I can guarantee 100% effort, but I cannot guarantee 100% results.