A Quote by John Mulaney

My standup persona is like I'll heighten things, but I'm observing the world as it is in sort of a heightened emotional state. — © John Mulaney
My standup persona is like I'll heighten things, but I'm observing the world as it is in sort of a heightened emotional state.
You're in this heightened emotional state from the beginning of the play. It's like when you first have your heart broken.
I know most people don't like to be around teenagers but I do. I'm one of the only people I can think of who can't wait for my kid to be a teenager. I think being a teenager is one of the most wonderful things in the world. I really enjoyed it - just this heightened emotional state where everything is beautiful and everything is new and you're convinced that you're really going to break the mould and be different from your parents. And the best part is that you have so much more time that you didn't have as a child.
The thing is, even if you're playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.
When I was doing standup, I always wanted to get out of the standup world and take it back into the theatrical world, like with "No Cure For Cancer."
When I was doing standup, I always wanted to get out of the standup world and take it back into the theatrical world, like with 'No Cure For Cancer.'
There's something about some of my favorite musicals that they put me in a sort of heightened state where I feel like I'm floating out of the theater rather than walking out.
Standup led me to acting because I liked standup, and I saw people on a stage, and the closest, nearest thing to me was doing plays. It was like, that's the same thing as standup - people are on a stage; they're being seen and saying things - so, because of my love of standup, I moved towards acting.
I discovered that this camera was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness. And it's that awareness of really looking at the everyday world with clear and focused attention that I'm interested in.
A lot of human learning comes from unsupervised learning where you're just sort of observing the world around you and understanding how things behave.
I would call it a comedy variety show. We have some people just doing straight standup. We usually try to have one musical act of sort. So its just people being funny in different ways, not just sketch, not just standup, not just characters, all of those things.
I never decided I wanted to be an actor. I just started doing standup because I love standup. Everything else has sort of been these tiny steps leading to this.
Our brains are wired such that it's difficult to take action until we feel at least some level of this emotional state. In fact, performance peaks under the heightened activation that comes with moderate levels of stress. As long as the stress isn't prolonged, it's harmless.
Over and over, since I was very young, I see things that are about to happen. You can call it heightened intuition; you can call it visions... I see it as a gift. It's my role to give people a heightened awareness, to show that basically we can change the world.
A lot of female comedians will go up there in a sweatshirt and Converses, trying to dress themselves down, because it is sort of a boy's club. I'll go up in my heels. I like that people don't think I'll be funny. I'll take that on. I don't do standup comedy - I do standup and I do comedy, but I don't go up there and do jokes.
I think that when we're looking at things when we're right in the center of things, as opposed to being a bit unmoored from what's going on around us, we see things through a kind of dulling lens of convention, and there's something about extreme emotional experiences that gives us a heightened clarity, I think, of thought and of feeling.
If you're going to be a good standup, or a successful standup, or a standup who can work for money, you have to eliminate the possibility of dying quickly.
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