Quotes About Comedy

There's comedy in tragedy, and tragedy in comedy. There's always light and dark in most jobs. Whether it's framed as a comedy, drama or tragedy, you try to mix it up within that. You can work on a comedy and it's not laugh-a-minute off set. You can work on a tragedy that's absolutely hilarious.

Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.

There's a lot of comedy in Intermission but it's got this depth. It's not comedy for comedy's sake - it's informed by something else. I like stuff like that

Comedy has sort of been my life-long obsession. I literally obsessed over comedy. I really didn't play sports - for me it was just comedy, computers and chess club; those were my big things.

British comedy - which has been a big inspiration to me for many years - is very different to Australian comedy and different again to American comedy.

There are a lot of great jokes you can sit down and write, but that's just a written joke, versus the comedy of the situation. Ideally, you're pulling as much comedy out of the situation as you can.

Comedy is immediate. Comedy is a solo mission. You're all by yourself, up there. And when you're in a film, on a set, it's a collaborative effort. It's about me being a tool for somebody else to create a story and a character from nothing, from their imagination.

Its consistency of what comedy can do and what comedy can be.Growing up with that show [The Simpsons] shaped my worldview.

My parents passed away when I was a teenager, so I had to learn different survival techniques, I think, in comedy. You know, using comedy as a pressure release, as a release valve in life really kept my sanity.

As a rule, Germans shouldn't do comedy. Their last box office comedy was Nosferatu.

To create a comedy major, I ended up starting a comedy night in the basement of my dorm, and I promoted and produced my final project, which meant I faxed press releases from an old Apple IIC, or whatever it was, to newspapers, not knowing if that would work or if that's how you do things.

I remember reading in a comedy book very long ago when I first started, a person said there's a difference between a sense of humor and a sense of funny. A sense of humor is knowing what makes you laugh and a sense of funny is knowing what makes other people laugh. The journey of comedy, in a sense, is negotiating those two worlds.

I like comedy. I would love to do comedy for a long time.

The object of a comedy is not to correct morals or ridicule the vices of society; no, a comedy should depict the discrepancies between life and purpose, should be the fruit of bitter indignation aroused by the degradation of human dignity, should be sarcasm, and not an epigram, convulsive laughter and not an amused grin, should be written with bile and not diluted salt, in a word, it should embrace life in its highest significance.

Postmodern comedy doesn't work well with very old audiences, because it's making fun of the comedy they enjoy.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

I love watching audiences scream. I imagine it's the same joy that a director feels who has made a comedy when he or she is sitting at the back of a theater listening to the audience laugh. That sound of laughter is so sweet to a comedy director and that's exactly how a horror film feels when you hear the audience scream.

Here's a woman, a real pioneer for other women looking for careers in stand-up comedy. And talk about guts - she would come out here and sit in this chair and say some things that were unbelievable - where you would have to swallow pretty hard... but it was hilarious... the force of her comedy was overpowering.

I felt audiences are happier to take comedy people who play darker people because there's a link between the psychosis of comedy and the psychosis of being a twisted character.

I did skit comedy online for many years, beginning around 2001. Around 2006 I started watching a lot of food television and got re-interested in food. I come from a very food-obsessed family. But I also wanted to do my own thing, which was the comedy.

Comedy clubs were something that came to pass in the '80s, but toward the end of that, in the early '90s, people started doing comedy again in alternative spaces.

After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that's where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.

A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

Like, I'm trying to make a statement that clean comedy is somehow better or loftier than dirty comedy, and I don't feel that way at all. I just think it's different. It's different. There's rock music, there's jazz music, there's reggae music: All of those forms are different.

You've got to realize that when all goes well, and everything is beautiful, you have no comedy. It's when somebody steps on the bride's train, or belches during the ceremony that you've got comedy!

The funny thing about The West Wing is - and I don't know what Aaron Sorkin says about it - but I'm convinced it was a comedy. It's a very intellectual and cerebral comedy, but it was SportsNight in the White House. It had an energy and a vitality and an intelligence and a passion that's rare. And it was extremely difficult to do, because they were so demanding about the dialogue.

I love physical comedy. Comedy that comes from an emotional place is amazing too and lets me develop in a new way as an actor.

It's completely unsexy [Yello, "Oh Yeah" 1985]. It does capture that weird '80s materialism and "We're gonna get it on now" vibe. But it's a very juvenile approach. It also became a weird signal for comedy, in the sense that when you heard the song, it meant comedy was happening on screen. I feel like this song was probably done in a couple of minutes in a studio.

People used to make fun of alternative comedy because sometimes it would be someone being funny, and sometimes it was a crazy man with a flute making no sense. And it's very easy to be like, yeah, that's not really comedy.

Comedy has been my way to reconcile with the world. I didn't really set out to do this, but comedy has served as my outlet to address my issues I have with this crazy world.

Yes, I would say my comedy is grunge, evidenced by the fact my jokes have put an end to big-hair glam comedy.

The fact of the matter is, you can't do comedy unless someone is behaving badly. Otherwise, it's not a comedy.

I get to do physical comedy! When do women get to do physical comedy? Very rarely.

I'd like to do a comedy with Emma Thompson. I admire her as an actress so much. I love her. And I didn't know it until recently that her whole career started in comedy.

I feel like with comedy, the crazy things that happen are never serious you know? Like, rubble being poured onto you in drama would be something that's absolutely terrible, but in a comedy it's absolutely terrible but so funny.

I watch drama. I don't watch a lot of comedy. Watching comedy is like work.

I think you need to have the guts to not use comedy. Often, the people that work in comedy use a joke to avoid contemplation.

There are a couple of things I want to impart to ladies who want to be in comedy: One, you don’t have to be weird or be quirky to get your job done. And two, comedy skill is not sexually transmittable. You do not have to sleep with a comedian to learn what you’re doing. Male comedians will not like that advice, but it is the truth.

Life is funny. Life isn’t categorized into comedy, drama, action, is it?So I don’t know why they try to categorize everything. It drives me crazy-why it would have to be just a romantic comedy or…I want to have a little integrity, a little story, you know

I guess you get pigeon-holed in Hollywood, but I'm ok with that because I've been able to do a lot. I started in the theater, then I went to stand-up comedy, and then when I went into the movies to do comedy and drama and big movies and small movies.

What's great about comedy, obviously, is that you set up a situation that people assume one thing and then you break the assumption. That's basically the backbone to comedy. You set up a situation, let people make an assumption, and then you break the assumption.

I love Stewart Lee's 'Comedy Vehicle' on BBC2. The guy is a genius.

I've always just been attracted to comedy.

I don't want to sit and cry for an hour in a movie. I'd rather have an action or a comedy.

My comedy comes from pain. I can't stand to see someone hurting.

The more Keystone comedies I make, the more convinced I become that comedy is an art, and a high one at that.

Comedy is essentially made by young men, or older men with some form of arrested development, for young men or immature older men.

Comedy is what I really want to do and propel.