I suppose I'm going on stage and making jokes about the fact that the audience are expecting the show to be about something and that they might learn something.
Anyway, I collapsed in France in the middle of a tour. I hadn't been eating properly, I was getting very phobic about audiences, and I collapsed in pure fright.
When I was 4 or 5, I attended my father's concerts. He very often played Strauss waltzes as encores and I saw something happening with the audience.
The optimum frequency with which comedians should do a series is every year. I do one every three years. My audience is literally dying off.
I think I'd like to be a lion tamer, actually. That - that would provide the most audience entertainment if something went really badly.
I find that here in the States, audiences are generally less knowledgeable, from the cognitive point of view, though they are emotionally more receptive.
In some ways, what I learned is that you can take a character and breathe with them, and it's up to the audience to interpret rather than you putting moral stamp on the character.
I'm not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I'm fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I'm actually quite shy and reserved.
Audience engagement is critical to the survival of your brand; if you don't engage them you endanger your brand. It's social interaction.
I'm just saying if you want to reach large audiences, then rely on professionals, meaning people who are in the industry and are trained for it, rather than just idiot savants.
Politics is pop. Our job as comedians - especially me, as a late-night talk show, which is a broader audience - is to amplify what we think America is thinking.
I want to speak directly to the audience, to say, 'I'm like you - I'm frustrated, I'm not an expert, I don't have a manual on parenting, I make mistakes, I'm selfish too.'
I've learned there is a void in adult stories across the land. Hollywood, whatever that is anymore, is losing their ability to tell those stories because they're not even thinking of that audience.
And we had the perhaps unfair advantage of not having to worry about what an audience was gonna think. We were in a vacuum. We were making little short films, really.
As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience.
I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
I was always the lead role in plays. I like entertaining people. I like when you're on stage doing crazy stuff and the audience gets it.
But I don't mind, I'm a bit of a touring animal. When I'm on tour that is the greatest thrill for me, playing to a live audience.
I believe that given the audience attention level, we could do an even more compelling 90 minutes.
I would advise anyone starting out as a singer/songwriter to play live as much possible. You never know who might be in the audience.
I could keep trying to do the same kind of comedies. You know how it's going to go, and you can get an audience with it, but then I feel like a hamster on a wheel.
