A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
And I did laugh sans intermission an hour by his dial. O noble fool, a worthy fool — motley's the only wear.
Charlie Chaplin's genius was in comedy. He has no sense of humor, particularly about himself.
Comedy comes from conflict, from hatred.
Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.
Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.
Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.
Comedy naturally wears itself out — destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.
Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.
Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.
I always loved comedy, but I never knew it was something you could learn to do. I always thought that some people are born comedians … just like some people are born dentists.
I think being funny is not anyone's first choice.
I was doing stand-up at a restaurant and there was a chalkboard on the street out front. It said, ''Soup of the Day: Cream of Asparagus. Ellen DeGeneres.''
If I get a hard audience they are not going to get away until they laugh. Those seven laughs a minute — I've got to have them.
In comedy, reconcilement with life comes at the point when to the tragic sense only an inalienable difference or dissension with life appears.
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
My routines come out of total unhappiness. My audiences are my group therapy.