Audience Quotes

We have to stretch out the audience. It can’t be this narrow – we have to stretch out the point of view.

Sometimes when I perform, and it’s obvious the audience is just there to party, or if I feel a wall between me and the audience, I get existential about it.

The best way to make your audience laugh is to start laughing yourself.

Maybe the actors that used to turn down William Goldman’s scripts – where he wanted them to stretch and grow, and he was mad at ’em, and said, “Why won’t they be a real actor?” – maybe they just knew their audience. It’s too bad.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.

Part of the success of the show is that the audience sees themselves in the characters, becomes the characters. The more they inhabit the characters, the more they see.

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.

I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

The audience is the barometer of the truth.