Michael Patrick King Quotes

But I also know in standup, there's nowhere to hide. You get on stage and you deliver, or you are eviscerated and you are thrown into a pile of bodies at the bottom of a mountain.

When you're going for a joke, you're stuck out there if it doesn't work. There's nowhere to go. You've done the drum role and the cymbal clash and you're out on the end of the plank.

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

The Apollo seats 3,600 people: I could hear them making a huge noise for Milton Jones and Lee Mack. If the audience doesn't make the same amount of noise for you, you feel like you've failed.

A joke bombing on stage doesn't bother me, especially if it's intended to bomb.

I don't mind a crowd's not laughing; it's the groans that slow down the show.

It's grueling never knowing if the audience is going to think you're funny. It's soul-destroying when they don't laugh.

The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to do a documentary on your life and you're watching it with an audience and there's not a laugh.

There is nothing - nothing - like writing a great joke and having that joke kill onstage.

In standup, the feedback is instantaneous, and if it fails, you know you'll be off-stage and hiding in a short time.

I remember thinking as I was doing the jokes for the first time, "If I can hear that very clearly, I'm not hearing laughter." It just became deafening, this buzzing noise. I mean, it was brutal. It was really terrible. Then I remember thinking, "At least nobody important, or anyone who I really respect, saw that." And then literally right when I went off the stage, Jerry Seinfeld got up and went on. So I was like, "Oh great. Seinfeld saw me bomb." On the other hand, I thought, "At least no one will be thinking of me anymore. They'll just be focusing on him."

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

The hardest part, for real, is probably when you just don't feel like going on stage and being funny.

I started to do a study on how not to do stand-up comedy. Yeah, it's lonely work. You die, you die alone. It's you, the light, and the audience. If you win, you win big. If you lose, you lose big time.

As a comedian, I don't know if they're laughing because it's funny or if they're laughing at me because I'm not funny. And I'm thinking, 'Who cares? They're laughing.' If you go on stage, and they're laughing at you full-on for 60 minutes? You know, whatever puts them in the seats.

Any audience that gets a laugh out of me gets it while I'm facing them.

I wasn't exactly uncomfortable when I did my first comedy. I was just very aware of the risks; if you do a comedy that sucks, and you suck in it, then you won't get a chance to do it again.

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

With comedy, it's a combination of knowing the comedic beat was good - it made you laugh, it made people on the crew laugh. With drama, you do something deep and if your stuff was really effective, the ultimate result is silence. Silence is not necessarily... that would also be the result if you sucked.

Comedy clubs can be brutal. Those people are for real, and if you aren't funny, they aren't laughing. They don't care who you are.

There's really nothing like a live audience right there. When you're in a bad show, you can hear the creaks in the chairs.

'Full House' was the first time I had ever been in front of a live audience. I said a line I had rehearsed with my mom, and they laughed. It was wild. To have that energy of the live audience was like, Whaaat? Feeding off that live audience was, to a 4 or 5 year old, a high.

Everybody in comedy has something like that happen to them: They bomb, or no one shows up. You're like, 'Hey, I'm funny, trust me!' And the world collectively goes, 'Yeah, you and everybody else.'

I did my first set at a talent show, and I couldn't finish because the judges didn't like my jokes. They were 'offensive.'

I like the stage lights to be bright so I can't see people because I will inevitably only see the ones who aren't laughing.