Marcus Brigstocke Quotes

But television, when I was doing it, was all about scoring. You had to make these jokes bang, do whatever you could to make the material really pop. And if it didn't, there was something wrong with the material, or with you.

When you're doing stand-up, you can comment if something fails, get a laugh from that.

Richard Lewis is the master at taking a joke that he's told a million times in a row in the past year, on the road, and making it look like he's pulling it out of thin air.

When you're a stand-up, you play in front of 600 people, and it's all about timing. I could never do stand-up comedy; it would be way too hard for me.

My stand-up is quite good now, people say. It's just like a big conversation each time. Every gig is a rehearsal.

There is nothing more joyful to me than hearing a live audience laugh. Especially when I planned it that way!

You say a line and you wait for them to laugh, then you say another line and you wait... It felt weird to me. But it's interesting and the energy is almost like theatre, I suppose, with all the people there.

Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.

You really have no idea whether or not what you're writing is funny. In stand-up and sketch comedy, you know right away and you can make your changes accordingly.

With comedy, it's really hard to tell if something's working on the page - you really need the actors to bring it alive. The scariest part is if people will laugh or not.

When you're a standup comic, you get up and you try stuff, and you're always kind of seeing how far you can push things.

When you improvise, you work off the laughs from the audience, but when you step on stage to do standup, it's silent.

Stand-up is successful if they laugh. It's unsuccessful if they don't laugh.

When I began doing stand-up, it took me a long time to get an hour's worth of material together.

I feel the life expectancy of a comedian is 30 seconds. If you don't hook an audience in half-a-minute, you're dead.

I need to keep my ad-libbing skills honed and make sure I'm able to banter with people and treat topics a bit more light-heartedly. But as a stand-up, first and foremost, my job is to make sure that I can write the routine that hopefully people will talk about when something big happens.

Stand-up comedy is something that you have to strive to do, multiple times a night, every night, to be good.

In television, there are so many things between you making a joke and the audience seeing it. It's like an assault course.

I thought that I was going to be a stand-up comedian or an actress. Turns out, I can't act my way out of a paper bag and stand-up comedy is a lot harder than it appears.

If you're not doing something or saying something in comedy, the camera is going to go somewhere else.

Stand-up comedy is what I do, and it's so rewarding. If you write a joke and tell it to an audience of 15,000 people who laugh their heads off at it, it's the best feeling in the world.

I can never tell when something is funny. I just have to do it onstage and find out.

I never used to tell jokes on stage. Now I'm cutting up jokes all night long.

I enjoy stand-up because it has the biggest reward: instant gratification. You can hear the people laughing.

I could never do stand-up because it's that thing of having to get up on stage. And out of every 10 jokes you tell, nine of them have to get a really good response.