A Quote by Peter Stone

You listen to the audience. The audience is wrong individually and always right collectively. If they don't laugh, it isn't funny. If they cough, it isn't interesting. If they walk out, you are in trouble.

Peter Stone

Quote Topics

Always Audience Collectively Cough Funny Individually Interesting Laugh Listen Out Right Trouble Walk Wrong

Quote Author

Peter Stone
American - Writer
February 27, 1930 - April 26, 2003

A good stand-up, you lead the audience. You don't kowtow to the audience. Sometimes the audience is wrong. I always think the audience is wrong.

Zach Galifianakis

But the audience is right. They're always, always right. You hear directors complain that the advertising was lousy, the distribution is no good, the date was wrong to open the film. I don't believe that. The audience is never wrong. Never.

William Friedkin

As an actor, early on, you learn that the audience is never wrong. And if you think they are wrong, you need to find a different way to make a living. Collectively the audience is smarter than you will ever, ever be.

William H. Macy

The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience. That audience looks collectively at what is going on on the stage and collectively imagines that this is real.

Simon McBurney

I'm still learning about music. The best way to learn is to listen to the audience. When you listen to the audience, they will tell you what they like. I wish these big corporations, instead of telling the audience what they should have, would listen.

Tony Bennett

If you tell the reader it's funny, then the audience is like an audience at a stand-up comedy club and they expect you to be funny, and if you're not, they notice. Whereas if you read a regular op-ed about Israel or the family or medicine, you're not starting with the assumption that you're supposed to laugh.

Dave Barry

I will have a playlist ready that I'll play out to the audience before I walk on stage, and I'll listen to that same playlist in the room, so by the time I walk on stage, I'm in the same frame of mind the audience is.

Jack Garratt

The audience works as such a mob. They either all laugh or all don't laugh, and, you know, changes from audience to audience.

Sarah Silverman

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.

Frank Capra

What I prefer is an audience who listen. And are intelligent. Which I try and assume every audience is. And that if something goes wrong, it's generally my fault and not theirs.

Dylan Moran

Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience.

Burt Ward

I always worried I'd forget my lines or say the wrong words or the audience would laugh in the wrong places.

Lawrence Welk

I made a point of always teaching undergraduates because they are not a captive audience. . . . I always tried out my research ideas first in the classroom to get feedback from people who didn't have to listen to me if I didn't make it interesting.

Edmund Morgan

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.

Mort Sahl

Comedy is a serious business. It's frustrating when I can't find the right thing that makes the crew laugh. If I don't make them laugh, I get very disappointed in myself. You don't really have a live audience, so you just depend on the crew to let you know if you're doing something funny.