A Quote by H. L. Mencken
Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
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God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
I was afraid no one would laugh, and I wanted to pretend I wasn't noticing the audience. I didn't want the audience to get the idea I was telling a joke and waiting for a laugh.
Ultimately, an audience wants to laugh. That's who they like, the comedian who makes them laugh.
As a comedian, I'm forced to have a tough skin. Until people laugh, they are detractors. You walk into a new audience where nobody knows you, they go: 'Make us laugh. Show us what you're made of. Prove why we should be listening to you.'
One of the biggest misconceptions about me is that I'm a comedian, which I'm not. A comedian is someone who can stand up in front of an audience and make you laugh. I've never done stand-up and I never will. I'm a comic actor. My comedy comes through my characters.
A hero has to become a comedian to do a comic role but a comedian does not have to do anything. People laugh at him anyway. Even when I attend funerals, people look at my face and laugh.
The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.
The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to do a documentary on your life and you're watching it with an audience and there's not a laugh.
The violence or the vaudeville style of comedy is a technique all by itself. You get up there, and you are a comedian, and you're doing one thing. That is, you're going to make the audience laugh.
The audience works as such a mob. They either all laugh or all don't laugh, and, you know, changes from audience to audience.
You know, a comedian's comedian is just that - it's a guy who's original and funny and can make comics laugh.
The fact is that really no comedian sets out to offend you. Some comics enjoy the challenge of taking a subject that is likely to be found offensive and trying to make it funny‚ but the object is still to make you laugh. Offense is only a calculated risk. It's highly unlikely that a comedian whose only goal was to repulse you would ever make it past an open-mic stage, far less build a long career of touring theatres and television appearances.
'Friends' played in this territory of being funny, and then also just grabbing your heart. And not afraid of that. It was a comedic soap opera. Not being afraid to have an audience feel something, laugh and cry, was quite extraordinary and quite wonderful.
I try to make the majority of my audience laugh. That's my audience. They'll laugh at the dead terrorist.
The best way to make friends with an audience is to make them laugh. You don't get people to laugh unless they surrender - surrender their defenses, their hostilities. And once you make an audience laugh, they're with you. And they listen to you if you've got something to say. I have a theory that if you can make them laugh, they're your friends.
You can't expect everyone to laugh or applaud you for doing edgy things. Sometimes you'll miss. But I think comedians are artists and there's a value in failure. It kind of works both ways between comedians and audiences. The audience has to understand that comedians are going to sometimes tell a joke that doesn't work out with dark subjects, and the comedian has to understand that sometimes they 'll fail and it's not the audience's fault for not getting it or loving it.
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