Performance Instinct Quotes

Comedians dissect jokes all the time. Comedians are beautiful structuralists. But ultimately it's an athletic endeavor. You have to be able to just hit the backhand. You can't think about all the pieces of it. You can't think about your swing. You just have to do it. Reading someone else's deconstruction of what I do, all it does is put me in my head. On nights when the show goes particularly well, I am not aware of its fluidity. A lot of nights I'm just worried that I'm not going to be as good as the script in front of me.

I think it was somewhere around age 3 when I fell down the stairs at my house, and I got up and did a Jerry Lewis impression and got a big laugh. And I thought, "Oooh, I like that. I think I need to do this for a living!"

We did a lot of that in drama school: intellectualising and maybe justifying your position. 'I am a thinking actor and I have thought this through' - well, just do it. I much prefer the doing aspect.

My parents never pushed me towards music. I feel like, growing up in a musical household and always being surrounded by it, I was always kind of a performer child. I remember my parents would have guests over, and they would bring their kids, and I would make sure that we were ready to put a show on.

What I've learned about acting is that it needs to be mysterious. If you overthink how a beat needs to be played, it can trip you up.

Acting isn't something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you're going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.

A conductor can do wild things which can feel forced, but if you're directing from within the orchestra, you can't do that, things have to feel natural.

Singing and being truthful to a song... I've developed that skill, and I know how to do that real instinctively, that's all I've been doing for the last 25 years.

I started out as a dancer as a kid; I've been dancing since I was 4. So, performing was always part of what I was. I don't know if it I enjoyed the response I got from people or if I liked having an audience, but there's something in me that wanted to perform.

Sometimes you don't want to get married too much to a lot of rehearsing, I feel, when it comes to film, because there's so many technicalities. So if I'm in my head, I've gotten settled on something, I'm gonna have to change it if I get there and something was set that's completely different.

If I'm playing a violin thing, for instance, I tend to respond to that sound with the way I finger.

One of the beauties about being an actor is that nothing really has to make sense. You just do it and live it and hope it comes out and try to find the truth in what's in the text in your own way and hopefully you can find truth in the text and everything else just comes.

In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don't really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face. And that's really not a good instinct with a 'Daily Show' field piece, where it's supposed to be an interview.

I've always been compelled by some force to be a performer.

I want to forget what I've learned about the character, but the reality is that you can't, because you've absorbed it. It's there in that moment when you need it. The hard part is to trust it.

I never practice before, I never work hours on a script. I just choose my characters and trust them, and after that, it's about the director taking your hand.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

The spirit of the poet craves spectators... even if only buffaloes.

When I act, I don't even know there's a camera there, don't care.

I tell you, I've always been quite physical about acting. I've always felt about for the shape of someone or the deportment, for better or worse. Sometimes I think I've done it disastrously, and other times, when I'm not thinking about it so much, less disastrously, but I can't seem to control it much.

I approach music and acting the same way, through spontaneous improvisation. I never really try to rehearse anything, do it over and over, except when we're inside a take.