One night I realized I had been on for twenty minutes and had not gotten a single laugh from the dead Tuesday-night crowd. I thought, “Why not go for the record?” I set my mind to it and finished the show without having roused one snicker. However, there was a sign of encouragement from these early jobs, and years later I heard it phrased perfectly by Bill Cosby. He said that early in his career, when the audience wasn’t laughing he could hear the waitresses laughing, and they saw the show night after night. I noticed that the waitresses were laughing.
—Steve Martin, “Television,” Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, p. 106, 2007.
