“Cheers” star Ted Danson recalls asking unresponsive studio audience if they could hear the jokes: 'Yeah, we can'
- - - "Cheers" star Ted Danson recalls asking unresponsive studio audience if they could hear the jokes: 'Yeah, we can'
Jordan HoffmanJune 26, 2025 at 9:00 PM
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Ted Danson, as Sam "Mayday" Malone, on 'Cheers'
Just because everybody knows your name, it doesn't mean they will laugh at your jokes.
Ted Danson invited Fred Armisen on his podcast this week (the one called Where Everybody Knows Your Name), and the two comedy veterans talked about their years in the television trenches. Danson, most recently seen on the Netflix series A Man on the Inside, reflected on times when something he thought was going to kill actually died in front of Cheers' renown "live studio audience."
"This must have happened to you all at Saturday Night Live," he mused to Armisen. "All week long on Cheers we would rehearse, and there was something that we could barely get through. We would be rolling on the ground. It was so funny," he remembered.
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Woody, Sam, Cliff, Carla, and Norm. All your friends from 'Cheers'
Continuing, Danson said, "[Then the] audience comes. Here comes the moment, and you could hear a pin drop. And it's like, instead of being horrified, it's the funniest thing because your body is all of a sudden plummeting to earth."
Maintaining a sense of humor about all this, Danson remembered, "One time a joke died, and [director James Burrows] turned and looked at the audience and said, 'Can you hear it? Are the mics on?' And they went, 'No.' And we turned it on, the joke killed."
Alas, this didn't always do the trick.
"A week later," Danson reflected upon a time that something didn't land, "I decided to go, 'Wait a minute. Can you hear us?' [They responded.] 'Yeah. We can.'"
Chuckling, Danson added, "When [Burrows] called it, it was [because the microphones were off]. When I called it, it was, 'Oh, no. We hear you loud and clear.'"
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'Cheers' director James Burrows in between Ted Danson and Shelley Long
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Incidentally, when Danson calls James Burrows "Cheers' director," he's not fooling. The series co-creator called action on 237 of the series' 275 episodes. The 85-year-old winner of 11 Emmys and five Directors Guild of America awards, whose career began in 1974 with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, is very much not retired. He most recently directed (and acted as executive producer on) all 10 episodes of the Hulu series Mid-Century Modern starring Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, and the recently departed Linda Lavin.
You can check out all of Fred Armisen's chat with Ted Danson by hitting play below.
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