Comedy Pressure Quotes

Around year seven or eight, you'd kill yourself when you realized Norm had to enter and you had to come up with a new beer joke.

I don't know about other comedians, but I know that I never have felt anything like stage fright. I've felt nervous before big shows, but I think that's different than stage fright.

The hardest part about improv is getting the audience to relax and enjoy themselves, because most improv is not very good, and the audience is nervous for the performers the whole time. Not that they don't even like the show, but they feel bad for the performers.

You go to any Jay-Z concert, and he plays his hits. Comedians don't have hits. You have to have a whole brand-new hour. You have no hits to rely on. It's the hardest thing.

Sometimes I worry about things changing and people not liking me any more. As a comedian you do feel like you're walking on a knife edge.

I could never do stand-up because it's that thing of having to get up on stage. And out of every 10 jokes you tell, nine of them have to get a really good response.

You have more of a responsibility to make the audience laugh. In comedy, we do have to say, "All right, it's been two minutes in the film. We need another laugh here." With drama, there's no pressure in that regard. It's a different kind of pressure, but it's not like we need to make someone laugh.

As a comedian, you have everything working against you.

Humor is hard, hard, hard. And if you fail with humor, you don't fail halfway. You drop the ball humor-wise and everyone notices.

Kind of the exhausting thing about doing pure comedy, or something that's broader, is you're kind of a slave to the laugh. If it's not funny, then there's not much point in doing it. The kind of ueber-objective is to make people laugh. You always have to have that in the back of your mind, 'Eh, I've got to figure out a way to make this funny.'

Some people expect me to be funny all the time, and I'm not necessarily funny all the time.

I don't like the pressure to try to tell the best jokes. I'm not good at jokes.

Fans feel they know me, so they want me to be on-the-spot funny, and it's hard to fulfil their expectations.

I do find comedy difficult. I don't know why. Maybe I think about it too much. There's a tremendous amount of pressure to be funny.

They shouldn't call anything a boot camp unless you're going off to war. Standup boot camp has been a fantastic thing, for the people putting it on. They keep you out in the woods and won't let you come back until you're funny. Lenny Bruce came up with his Religions Inc. bit on a day hike.

There is nothing quite as loud as the silence of an audience when a comedian is on stage.

It's grueling never knowing if the audience is going to think you're funny. It's soul-destroying when they don't laugh.

Every day I do one or two podcasts that 92 percent of people never will hear. I'm constantly producing, constantly making jokes for Twitter. There's a lot of pressure there. On the flip side, I think having to produce like that makes you a better comedian.

I never did standup before. It just looked like it was really hard, looked like there was like up days and down days - and I'm too emotionally unstable for that. I need to always be funny and always be loved.

I don't think there's anything more scary than being forced into doing stand-up comedy.

I find it pressurising coming to the Voodoo Rooms to do my hour of comedy.

I like the stage lights to be bright so I can't see people because I will inevitably only see the ones who aren't laughing.

I would get ill before going onstage - something about getting in front of people, and if they don't laugh, I'm a bomb. I got over it when somebody laughed.

Never perform for your family. They either laugh too hard or not at all.

There are many problems with being a comedian: the travel, the late nights, the pressure, the fear of running out of funny things to say.