Fanny Brice Quotes

It's hard not to be affected by the live audience.

I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.

You can only be as good as your audience. Sometimes you can be as bad as your audience, but you have to remember you can never be better than them.

I learn more from the audience than I can from anybody else. Not from what they write on the scorecards, but how they respond to the movie while they're watching it - where they laugh and where they react.

I can tell how I'm doing, and I can tell if the crowd is particularly dead.

You're very aware in the theater by the response you get, but not so much on television, obviously.

I feed off the audience a lot, their energy.

I see the audience as the final collaborator. I think it's kind of bullshit when people say, "I'm not interested in the audience reaction." I'm like, "Then why do you do theater? You can write a book, then you don't have to see how the audience reacts." It's a living, breathing thing.

As far as how much you listen to the audience, you listen to them when they really hate something.

The audience has always been my best director.

What's great about having an audience is they can let you know what they don't think is funny, and you can just cut that out and keep trying.

We like reactions - a reaction is walking out on us, a reaction is throwing tomatoes at the stage, that's a healthy psychological reaction.

A performance is only as good as the audience you are playing to. A lot of times you feed off of the audience, and we always try to give them all we've got and sometimes you don't get a lot back, but we've never been dead whenever we've performed.

I think as a standup performer you have to feel the audience. So the audience kind of dictates what they get, you know?

The audience plays a huge part in how a piece will actually form. They really allow the performers to walk a tightrope in a way that never seems to happen in the privacy of your own four walls. I'm listening to the audience, and they're listening to me.

When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.

The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.

You can feel whether an audience is tightened up and pulled back. Of course the opposite is an audience like we've been having in LA, which is fabulous.

I once spoke to 9,000 people, but they managed to fit them all into a structure that resembled a Zeppelin hangar, so it was a contained space in which whatever laughter I generated could ricochet and hang around for a bit, encouraging others to join in.

You're in there, you're having a match, and you're feeding off that crowd. That's the gasoline that fuels the match, and that's how you make your decisions. If you're not listening to that crowd when you're working, you're missing the biggest part of what working is all about.

The crowd is the crowd. You're gonna take them as an individual performer how you take them. The key is how do you learn from them. How do you use whatever is happening reaction-wise to get better.

Here's the funny thing: Nothing drives a performance like an audience that gives back and even takes over. ECW was a product that will be remembered as much, if not more, for its audience interaction as for the things that happened in the ring.

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.

It definitely feels different to perform to people who know your music. Because people's feedback is not just, 'Oh my God, that was amazing. Who are you?'

The last collaborator is your audience ... when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written. Things that seem to work well -- work in a sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece -- suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional or a little overlong or a little overweight or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping from an audience.