#Audience

"I've always been a fan of a Johnny Carson because he was so great with an audience and not afraid of self-deprecating humor."

"I've been encouraging documentary filmmakers to use more and more humor, and they're loath to do that because they think if it's a documentary it has to be deadly serious - it has to be like medicine that you're supposed to take. And I think it's what keeps the mass audience from going to documentaries."

"Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money."

"The line between humor and bad taste is your audience, in which some people will find everything offensive, and some people will find nothing offensive, but the truth is that most humor originates in what would be called bad taste."

"I really subscribe to that old adage that you should never let the audience get ahead of you for a second. So if the film's abrasive and wrongfoots people then, y'know, that's great. But I hope it involves an audience."

"Word of mouth—it's more powerful, more convincing, and more audible than word of hand. If you need me, I’ll be in the audience clapping."

"Whether it's viewers of the show or readers of my columns and books, I'm consistently impressed with their wit, humor and insight. That goes for about 95 percent of the audience. The other five percent are why the 'Delete' option and restraining orders were invented."

"She had coffee-colored eyes, if java were blue-green, and we made love like nobody was watching, which is probably why the audience demanded a refund for our poor performance."

"The great thing about 'Weeds' is that everything we do is never quite serious enough to be taken seriously. It always has humor behind it, and it think it makes it definitely more fun for the audience."

"'Big Bang Theory' is not my kind of show. It's not my humor. I don't like multicam comedies. I don't want an audience to tell me when to laugh."

"I hope we're all kind of influencing each other now to keep the quality up on those things. They seem to be getting better and better and better as there's not only sort of a film geek audience, there's also a general interest in the overall film consuming population."

"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."

"Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible."

"If I told you that my global audience has shot up 100% in the last six months, what would you say? If you were to say, “So you went from one reader to two readers?” you’d be absolutely correct. And after I had congratulated you on your keen guess, I’d thank you for being 50% of my reading base."

"I'd love to knock an audience cold with one note, but what do you do for the rest of the evening?"

"I put the sing in single—especially when I’m in the shower. Does anybody have any requests they’d like to shout out while the water’s getting hot? As always, silence all cell phones during the duration of my performance."