I love performing on stage the most. It's getting that instant reaction from a live audience. There are no boundaries, you can take your character as far as you want to, you can be the craziest person ever.
When I am composing in a studio, I cannot gauge what the audience feels. Sometimes, good songs don't get the recognition because the films fail. But when you are performing live, the reaction is immediate.
A responsive audience is the best encouragement an actor can have.
The stage is bigger than life. There you are projecting to an audience. In television, you're drawing the camera in to you. And with TV, there isn't that immediate feedback from an audience. You do hours and hours of taping and never get that response.
WWE definitely gives you the forum, the stage to do different things and see what works. That's the cool thing about being in front of a live audience every single week in WWE. You get instant feedback.
I love the feeling of letting fly, of pushing as far as I could go with my voice. The only way you can really graduate how you do it is by doing it regularly to people who don't have to be super impressed. You can do it in the studio all day long but you don't get the flashback that you get onstage.
There's nothing in the world like live entertainment. With TV, you have to wait for your results; with live entertainment, people let you know right then and there. That relationship is established in 30 seconds. The first 30 seconds, they'll let you know whether they like you or not.
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.
We would play songs live on stage, and then we'd watch their reaction we were receiving immediately, if people were dancing and singing along. If they weren't, then we'd go into the dressing rooms of the different NBA teams that we were playing in their arenas, and we'd change the songs right there.
On film, when you're driving home from the set, you realize what you should have done, but it's too late. When you're taking the subway home from your play, you realize what you did wrong, and you go back the next night and you do it better, or you screw it up again in a different way. It's a different thing altogether.
In movies, you don't get reactions: Live, when you do a joke, you know in a second whether it's good or bad. But in a movie, since no one is allowed to laugh or do anything, when you're done with a scene, you're left asking, 'Was that funny?'
Stuff that happens to you in your life when you're shooting a TV show, you have to be careful, because it might end up in the show. And that's what I think is the neat thing about TV: how alive it is, and how the writers respond to the stimulus that they're getting from the actual actors. Whereas a movie is more hermetically sealed.
You really only understand whether a song's good or not when you properly play it out in public for the first time.
I tend to develop my rambling anecdotes by actually getting up and performing them. That's the joy/horror of stand up - if you have the germ of an idea that you think might be funny, there is a way of finding out if it's funny very quickly.
You can play a gig as a band and not know that they hated you; with standup, after every line, you know.
The thing I love about YouTube is it's almost like having an instant audience for improv.
I always think it's just best to just make stuff and to carry on making stuff, even if it's not off your own back, because that's the only way... especially as a comedy writer, I make short films and then show them to live audience, so if they're laughing you know you're doing something right.
I've been doing a lot of internet performances... it's really weird for me to not feel the crowd, to not feel the people in front of me.
Watching a movie with an audience is so exciting. For me, coming from TV, you finish an episode and then it airs, and I'm at home. There's no gratification and there's no audience interaction with it.
