On the stage you're there, it's live. There's a beginning, a middle, an end. When something is funny you hear it right away.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I can never tell when something is funny. I just have to do it onstage and find out.
In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living.
Every now and then, when you're on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It's a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live.
When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.
The great thing about stage is that you have a live audience.
Live stage is being made as you go along. You feel the energy. There's nothing like a live audience.
There's nothing like the buzz of live theater. You put it out there and receive an instant reaction: laughing, crying, yelling, applauding.
As you get older as a comedian and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.
When you improvise, you work off the laughs from the audience, but when you step on stage to do standup, it's silent.
When you're on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn't exactly a sound - it's a hum, like the streets.