Johnny Vegas Quotes

I feel like every time I go out, I want to do a good job. I want people to say that he's just as good at stand-up as he is in some of the movies I've seen him in, so I try to do the best every time I go out there.

I don't mind a crowd's not laughing; it's the groans that slow down the show.

There's no second chance on stage, and I was trained to make the most of my first chance.

I started to do a study on how not to do stand-up comedy. Yeah, it's lonely work. You die, you die alone. It's you, the light, and the audience. If you win, you win big. If you lose, you lose big time.

Live performance really terrifies me. I haven't done it, really, in years. I think that's why I retired from my brief career in stand-up.

Comedy can be harder because if you aren't making the audience laugh, they're going to turn on you quicker. They'll go along with mediocre drama more than they'll go along with mediocre comedy.

You can play a gig as a band and not know that they hated you; with standup, after every line, you know.

Every time I go onstage, it's a little less 'Chris Rock's brother.'

I did my first set at a talent show, and I couldn't finish because the judges didn't like my jokes. They were 'offensive.'

I've had plenty of friends tell me that their first time doing stand-up, they do well, and then they tank for a while after that. Kind of like the first time you do a drug, you're like, "Huh! This is pretty darn good," and then you spend all your money trying to get the same high.

During a big rock show, you can flub a few things and nobody will hear it, because it gets buried under everything else.

You get very comfortable doing the open mic circuit, turning up to the same places and playing to 20 people. In that situation, it won't matter if you aren't great on that night because no one will really remember who you are. Then suddenly you are doing rooms to 400 people and you have to up your game.

When you go out there to do comedy, you feel like you're doing battle with the audience a lot of the time. You're either going to get 'em, or you're not.

Stand-up, for me, is really more of an addiction, so you have to feed the beast whenever you can.

But I also know in standup, there's nowhere to hide. You get on stage and you deliver, or you are eviscerated and you are thrown into a pile of bodies at the bottom of a mountain.

I don't really like doing big stand-up. Whenever I do theaters, I don't like 'em. I don't think they're right for stand-up. I've seen people in theaters, and it just doesn't work, because you're talking to the guy next to you the whole time.

You're in front of an audience, but you're playing for a camera. There's this huge adrenaline rush, because you know that besides the audience in the studio, there are millions of people watching at home.

Onstage, there's no hiding; you either can or can't act. There's no second take.

I don't know, on a sitcom, and in theatre especially, you have to really be listening to an audience. And if you're losing them, you can hear the sniffs, and the playbills shuffling and whatnot.

A stage actor has to be 10% aware of the audience as he's performing.

I am a wild orchid of comedy, so I can only do well under specific conditions... There are people who I think can do any room, and do stadiums and thousand-seat theaters, and then there are people like me who just perform for my parents.

Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will - all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.

I keep getting these people at my shows who only know me from television. I can always tell when they're, like, emotionally flinching when I start doing my jokes.

But if applause throws off your timing, then you're not the kind of comedian I would like to see. All you have to do is stand there and take it.

I feel like I am one of those artists that, thank god, can sing live.