Comedy Improvement Quotes

When I started out in the late '80s, my act was pretty terrible, and for years, I kind of toiled in obscurity. I don't believe in a hierarchy in comedy; I feel that a person deserves respect the first time they get onstage, and after that, they just have to be funny and get more consistent.

A responsive crowd is great - they help you see new things in your comedy.

If you want to do standup, you have to go on stage. That's the only way to get good - stage times.

I do believe if we opened up a comedy theater in a city, that we're going to be able to teach improv better than whoever's there already. In general, I think I could say that.

Very early on, I met this one comic who said if you're not doing stand-up every night, you're not doing it. And so I just kind of believed that and worked off that.

That's the nature of comedy. You always want to be improving and growing and changing with what's happening in the world. That's when comedy is most effective.

I think you can go from being not very funny to working really hard for 10 years and figuring out how to make a living on the road, but I don't think you can rise much above that.

Now obviously popularity isn't everything when it comes to stand up comedy, but the art form itself is better today than it ever has before. I think there are more great comics. I think the standard is higher. The critical analysis is a little harsher, but that is also good. Maybe people have a higher standard than before, maybe they are a little more judgmental, a little more brutal, that makes people work harder. It makes the stand up better.

Sometimes a joke that doesn't work just needs a breath or a little word or the tiniest little change to be fixed.

It should be a law for one whole year that all laugh tracks are Seth Rogen. The world would get ever so slightly better.

That's what's great about standup comedy: the instant feedback. You get up on stage, you tell a joke, if it doesn't work, come back the next day with a better version of it.

I want to see better quality of comedy on TV.

People said to me, "You know, when you record a special, you're going to regret it. The one thing you'll regret because you're a comic is you'll think of better tags."

My specialty at 'SNL' was doing triage. There was always a great need for someone to say, 'Make this funnier. Give me an ending for this. What's a better big laugh for this towards the end? What's a better physical joke in this?' And I just really, over time, honed that specific thing so well.

Our shows today are better and funnier than they've ever been.

Every now and then you'll say something that didn't quite work. But the important thing is, as a comic, you try to learn why it didn't. And then you adjust and figure out how to either make it work or just abandon it because it's just not funny.