Quotes on Comedy

There's nothing worse than being an aging young person.

I'm afraid that the act of writing is so scary and anxiety-filled that I never laugh at all. In fact, when people tell me that such and such a scene or story is comical, I tend to gape. I did not intend comedy - ever, as far as I know. It's probably all a mistake. I am essentially a lugubrious writer. Ha ha!

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

Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.

I have remained true to my deepest convictions. I mean the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy—for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?

There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.

I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.

Middle age is when you still believe you'll feel better in the morning.

There are so many funny women in the world, and there has been for so many years, so I'll be happy when people can just move on from that, and things can just be 'comedies' and not 'female' or 'male,' and everyone gets an equal opportunity.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.

We're all comedy fans in my family. My parents mainly wouldn't let me watch stuff that was either annoying to them, or just garbage. My dad wouldn't let us watch 'The Flintstones' if he was home, because he said it was a rip-off of 'The Honeymooners'. But he would let us stay up really late in the summer and watch old 'Honeymooners'.

In the process of looking for comedy, you have to be deeply honest. And in doing that, you'll find out here's the other side. You'll be looking under the rock occasionally for the laughter.

I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy. Making people laugh one moment and the next making them feel really uncomfortable.

People are meant to be certain places, and I think I'm meant to be on a sound stage doing situation comedy.

Comedy should speak truth to power. It should always be aimed upward. When it's aimed downward, it's called bullying.

One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I write. If it had been, I probably wouldn't have wanted to translate it. There are no one-liners. It's much more a truthful comedy than a play of dazzling wit.

I think that comedy really tells you how it is. The other thing about comedy is that - you don't even know if you're failing in drama, but you do know when you're failing in comedy. When you go to a comedy and you don't hear anybody laughing, you know that you've failed.

I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it's the hardest. It's the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There's a big button marked 'fail,' and that's when nobody laughs.

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

I was definitely not the kid that just wanted to be famous for no reason whatsoever and then happened to find comedy. Fame and all that stuff have always been slightly terrifying to me, and it makes me very anxious.