Humor & Life Quote by David Cross

Cross lands a small, cranky truth that doubles as a mission statement for a certain strain of comedy: craft matters, and so does consent. "You can't just yell jokes at people" isn’t about volume so much as entitlement - the idea that an audience is obligated to receive whatever a comic wants to dump into the room. The line punctures the fantasy of comedy as a magic spell: say a "joke" and laughter is your due. No. Delivery without relationship is just noise.

The verb "yell" is doing the heavy lifting. It evokes hecklers, street-corner provocateurs, and the social-media habit of mistaking aggression for punchline. Cross is calling out a style of performance - and a style of public discourse - that treats attention as a hostage situation. The subtext is almost ethical: humor isn’t merely content, it’s an exchange. A joke needs timing, framing, and a shared set of assumptions; it needs the audience to be brought along, not shouted at.

Coming from Cross, a comedian associated with abrasive, brainy satire and a certain anti-authoritarian sneer, the line also reads as self-policing. He’s not arguing for softness; he’s arguing for precision. If your only tool is force, you’re not doing transgressive comedy, you’re doing dominance play. The sting of the quote is that it demystifies the job: being funny isn’t insisting you’re funny. It’s building the conditions where laughter can happen - and earning it instead of demanding it.