Harold Ramis Quotes

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.

With stand-up you've just got that one chance. Audiences can be quite fickle.

I feel the life expectancy of a comedian is 30 seconds. If you don't hook an audience in half-a-minute, you're dead.

You can succeed as a terrible director, but try doing that with stand-up: try being a terrible comedian and getting up on stage. The funny will win out very, very quickly.

The more you work in this business as a comedian, the closer you get to just being yourself onstage, on camera, the more well received you are.

Unlike movies, on stage there are no second chances. Everything is live. If someone messes up, forgets a line, gives the wrong cue, you need to have the presence of mind to move the play along.

Stand-up comedy is something that you have to strive to do, multiple times a night, every night, to be good.

If you're not doing something or saying something in comedy, the camera is going to go somewhere else.

At this point, I feel fairly comfortable in terms of performance. I think having a sketch background actually helps a lot. Because my background is acting, and stand-up, in a lot of ways, is acting.

You don't really know a song until you play it live.

The only way to get better at stand-up is to do loads of gigs, and I don't know. I spread myself pretty thin to get the stage time. I'd love to do more, really.

Every night, you fight for that standing ovation at the end of the night. And if you do something wrong, the domino effect is chaotic. And you must not allow yourself to make mistakes whatsoever. So in that case, theater, it's fascinating because of the discipline that you need.

There's no real preparing at home for stand-up. You just go and you just do it.

With a theatre audience there's always the additional sense of a sustained challenge of which I'm acutely aware and for which you need to have the tools ready - your voice, physicality, brain.

On stage, you've got dialogue you've learned. You've got a paying audience. It couldn't be better, you know?

A lot of the time, you're supposed to play to the top of your intelligence, as truthful as possible. But when you're on stage making people laugh, you're still acting. I think it helped me a bunch to go on stage two or three times a week.

It's a constant challenge to get your arrangement and musical expression across to a new audience, especially when you're playing live every night like we are.

I know what it feels like to walk out in front of a sold-out crowd of a thousand people that are there for you, and how good that feels, but as an opener, you just have to train yourself to think that it's going to be harder.

I have to visualise my jokes, live my jokes, feel the audience because every audience is different. It's like having a different dancing partner every night.

Being a dancer and a singer gave me some advantage with regards to having a stage presence. I always take my timing from the audience because they are half of my act.

When I began doing stand-up, it took me a long time to get an hour's worth of material together.

Bad improv happens with people who are inexperienced with each other and don't know the craft that well. But bad stand-up is something that could happen to someone at any level in their career.

It takes many years to be a great comedian.

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

When you're doing comedy constantly, you're organized: you know where everything is, you know how to get out of it, you know how to stretch it. But, like, doing 'SNL,' I stopped doing spots, and then I would finally do some sets - it take me so long to, kind of, get in the rhythm of it.