Chris Pratt Quotes

Comedy is harder than drama, because with comedy you're expecting a result..you make them laugh. [If] they ain't laughing then you're screwed.

A stand-up comedian faces the audiences and gets their immediate feedback. I hide behind the comic strip, and unless people write to me, I don't know what they think.

Something about not waiting for the laugh of a laugh track allows you to take lines that otherwise might be seen as just direct jokes, and make them seem realistic.

In movies, you don't get reactions: Live, when you do a joke, you know in a second whether it's good or bad. But in a movie, since no one is allowed to laugh or do anything, when you're done with a scene, you're left asking, 'Was that funny?'

When I'm playing comedy, I never do 'jokes.' Sometimes I'll deliver a line in a way I think is more likely to get a laugh, but all the best comedy is played straight. What's funny is the way it hits the world around it or the way it hits the other characters.

We don't have a laugh track, which helped Seinfeld a lot, and did kind of tell people when to laugh. It just made it a lot easier. Our show doesn't have that, so it's hard for Middle America to catch on.

In point of fact, I'm not sure there are too many comedies with laugh tracks anymore. Most of what you hear is live studio audience laughing as a show is filmed. If this prompts you to wonder who those actual human beings are who are laughing at some of this stuff, that is a mystification I share.

My experience tells me that any time you hear people laughing on a sitcom, it's the writers who happen to be closest to the microphones - not the audience.

The laugh track was invented to cue the audience to the jokes and encourage laughter in response. But it has another effect: if you hear people laughing and you're not, you start to question if maybe there's something wrong with you for not getting it.

The audience is so important. Because there's something that I might think is super funny, but if it's just not getting the feedback, I have to let it go.

The one [The Beverly Hillbillies] flaw in this is that you can't hear the people laughing.

Most of what's tricky about comedy is the perception of it and the audience's expectation.

When you try to go back and watch improv on tape, it almost never feels as good as it did when a crowd was laughing at it.

If you want to make people laugh, your face must remain serious.

Every laugh is not equal. They come from different places. That's sort of the challenge I go towards, making sure the laughs are for the reasons I want. It becomes a back and forth dance with the audience.

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.

Well, anybody can be a straight man if he hears well. You just have to wait for laughs. A straight man just repeats the questions and the comedian gets the laughs and you just wait for them and don't let them die completely at the tail end of the laugh.

I had a show that people thought used a laugh track. It wasn't; it was the real audience going crazy after everything that resembled a joke, that they could technically call a joke.

Timing is the essence of life, and definitely of comedy.

When anything doesn't hit with a huge laugh, as comics, it feels like, Oh no, oh no, we're sinking.

When I watch TV I can tell when someone is punching the joke and telling me when to laugh (I’ll decide when to laugh, thank you very much).

That's the nice thing about doing stand-up. There's no development, you just go out there and get an immediate response as to whether something is good or bad. Getting a laugh is the best measure of how well you're doing.

If people do not laugh it's not comedy.

When I do something good, the audience lets me know immediately. They laugh. That's it.

Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.