A Quote by Alan King
Comedy is an amazing calling. Once you get that first laugh, it's hard to turn away. Then, of course, you're hooked and you have to learn how to survive in the business.
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A friend once asked me what comedy was. That floored me. What is comedy? I don't know. Does anybody? Can you define it? All I know is that I learned how to get laughs, and that's all I know about it. You have to learn what people will laugh at, then proceed accordingly.
Once you learn how to make people laugh, then you get to choose exactly how you want to make them laugh.
The ultimate objective [of comedy] is to get a laugh, so if you can get a laugh off the fact that you did not get a laugh, then you've kinda saved the moment. Other professions don't have that luxury. You don't want to hear a brain surgeon say, "Man, am I so stupid! I cut on the wrong side of your head!!"
That's an animal fable about humility. If you survive your mistake, you must learn from it. Accept that you're fragile, vulnerable, and sometimes stupid. Realize that you're not immortal and you've got to take care of yourself. And then laugh it off and fly away.
You get the idea. Every business, like a painting, operates according to its own rules. There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once. There are no rules. You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over, and it's because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over. It's the greatest thrill in the world and it runs away screaming at the first sight of bullet points.
What is amazing is how stuck people are in their own habits. It is really hard to get people out of their habits. But once they shift, it also is amazing how rapid the progress can be.
Once you get hooked on the airline business, it's worse than dope.
I don't know how you can do comedy once every two weeks. Ever since I started, if I'm off for three days, I got to learn how to do comedy again.
I think it [my first heartbreak] probably just taught me that you will always heal. That this too shall pass. The first time you feel that sort of pain, you think it's never going to go away. Once you do survive it, you realize you can survive anything.
I fell into TV quite by accident but once I was in a newsroom for the very first time, I was hooked because I loved the adrenaline. There was a breaking story that day and people were running around to get the news on the air. I thought, Jesus, how do you get to do this? So, that's how it started. The bulk of my career was in TV.
It doesn't matter how many times you fail. It doesn't matter how many times you almost get it right. No-one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you. All that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.
The timing of comedy is so difficult. You've got to leave room for a laugh, you don't want to kill the laugh, but on film, you can't just suddenly stop for a laugh and then carry on. So, I think it's a real art form, comedy on film.
The first purpose of comedy is to make people laugh. Anything deeper is a bonus. Some comedians want to make people laugh and make them think about socially relevant issues, but comedy, by the very nature of the word, is to make people laugh. If people aren't laughing, it's not comedy. It's as simple as that.
Making someone laugh is a good way to get their defences down so that they might then be open to new ideas, especially when they're laughing at some common ground they relate to. Comedy's always been an amazing tool for social change.
Laughter keeps you healthy. You can survive by seeing the humor in everything. Thumb your nose at sadness; turn the tables on tragedy. You can’t laugh and be angry, you can’t laugh and feel sad, you can’t laugh and feel envious.
Once you learn how to work inside the ring - once you learn how to tell a story - then you can come to a big company like the WWE and learn the extra stuff, like the video, the pyro, the music, and that adds to everything you can do.
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