I don't mind a crowd's not laughing; it's the groans that slow down the show.
Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.
If something is very, very funny but possibly controversial, if it's truly funny, then it's worth doing. Things aren't worth doing for the sake of being controversial.
When you do stand-up, you're just concerned with trying to leave with some semblance of human dignity at the end of your performance.
The safest genre is the horror film. But the most unsafe - the most dangerous - is comedy. Because even if your horror film isn't very good, you'll get a few screams and you're okay. With a comedy, if they don't laugh, you're dead.
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.
When you're going for a joke, you're stuck out there if it doesn't work. There's nowhere to go. You've done the drum role and the cymbal clash and you're out on the end of the plank.
Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous.
I think TV companies don't take as many risks any more, it's a bit more prescriptive. There are more channels but there seems to be actually less main network channel comedy. You can't offend people as easily, people take things very seriously now. I think that's down to social media though because people can have little tribes of offence.
There's something so scary about trying out new material and being completely comfortable jumping into the abyss with a comedic idea.
I started to do a study on how not to do stand-up comedy. Yeah, it's lonely work. You die, you die alone. It's you, the light, and the audience. If you win, you win big. If you lose, you lose big time.
All you have in comedy, in general, is just going with your instincts. You can only hope that other people think that what you think is funny is funny. I don't have an answer but I just try to plough straight ahead.
I have no shame when it comes to making people laugh. I don't care what I look like.
I wasn't exactly uncomfortable when I did my first comedy. I was just very aware of the risks; if you do a comedy that sucks, and you suck in it, then you won't get a chance to do it again.
For myself, the way that I learned comedy was doing it live for four years, and only after doing sketch for four years did I feel confident enough to be like, 'Okay, I feel good about starting to put stuff on the Internet where it lives forever.' As opposed to one time at a college sketch show where it bombs and we never speak of it again.
If the worst that happens is that I wake up and see a picture of myself and a headline saying, 'He wasn't very funny last night', then I've got nothing to complain about.
With stand-up you've just got that one chance. Audiences can be quite fickle.
Unfortunately, I am not one of those comics where it's guaranteed that I hit it out of the park every time. You know, I am not completely reliable. It's always different, and it's a complete crapshoot whether I'm going to do well.
Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer.
If you decide to do comedy that involves risk, risk means risk, and you can't complain of flesh wounds if you sit down at the table to play.
Stand-up is an amazing art form, I think, because it's all about you having complete control of the situation, but absolutely none.
I was going to start off tonight with an Obama joke but I don't want to get audited by the IRS.
The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.
I started to make harder jokes before anyone else did. And the producers would get anxious. They'd say, 'That's a little bit hard-edged, isn't it?' And I'd say, 'Let's just try it and see how the audience reacts. If they don't like it, let's cut it out.' And the audience roared with laughter, so I learned you could do this harder humor and people loved it.
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.
