A Quote by Richard Herring
If you are a stand-up you can hone your material over successive performances, based on the audience response. Changing a single word or altering the pace or emphasis can make a previously failed witticism work.
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That's what I do in my stand-up. I work hard and hone the material and after a while audiences expect what I do to be good.
I prefer that for my own satisfaction over radio, there's no audience. TV, there's no audience. I need the response of the audience, even if it's a silent response.
A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation.
Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.
What social media has done - Facebook, Twitter - is show the audience. I don't have an audience. When I make my work, it just goes out into the ether. I have a thick skin and it just brings me down to earth, you know, to realize how out-there and far away and paltry the audience is that gets what I'm saying. It's depressing if I let it get to me. And it's the same with hanging a show, the way it's put up, like, three stories high and you can't read a single word.
If I make my window ten days for stand-up, the conclusion is that I failed and that I'm not good at stand-up. If I make it ten years - if I just wait - the conclusion might be something totally different. I think it's so cool to do things in which you discover the malleability of your own mind.
Second City Las Vegas is very different from Second City in Chicago on the main stage, where they do improv sets. That's how they kind of hone material, kind of work up to new material.
Look at the word responsibility-"response-ability"-the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.
There's nothing more powerful than stand-up. Crushing with your own material, with your own energy, controlling an audience: There's no better high. It's awesome.
An artist’s work is almost entirely inquiry based and self-regulated. It is a fragile process of teaching oneself to work alone, and focusing on how to hone your quirky creative obsessions so that they eventually become so oddly specific that they can only be your own.
As I've said previously as home secretary, dealing with immigration isn't just a single issue and a single measure and a single step that you take. You've got to keep working at that over time.
I'm just trying to make my favorite music. That's how I work; I just do things based on the way they feel to me. I want to be touched by the music I'm making. Luckily, other people have shared that response to my work over the years.
It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of your mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
In stand up every joke is thought about so meticulously, and one word can completely change how the audience responds. You're up there with no safety net; you can't shirk responsibility. It's your thoughts; it's your voice. You can't blame it on the writing, you can't blame it on the editor. You are just up there completely naked.
When I was a kid, it was the attention I got from it, the immediate response from the audience, the thrill of being onstage. That's carried over into my adult life, I can't pretend I don't like the attention or whatever, but for me now, I've witnessed incredible performances that have changed the way I see the art form.
I'm trying to change theater, in my own way - not just magic. I say that humbly, because I'm learning every single day. I do 15 shows a week, and every single audience I have is like a test screening for you, when you listen and go, "Really? They laughed at that?" All over the stage I have lines, written onstage, that I'm changing every single day.
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