 
|
We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.
-Fred A. Allen
|
|
|
|
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.
-Woody Allen
|
|
|
|
I think being funny is not anyone's first choice.
-Woody Allen
|
|
|
|
Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.
-Erma Bombeck
|
|
|
|
Today's comedian has a cross to bear that he built himself. A comedian of the older generation did an act and he told the audience, This is my act. Today's comic is not doing an act. The audience assumes he's telling the truth. What is truth today may be a damn lie next week.
-Lenny Bruce
|
|
|
|
The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can
-Lenny Bruce
|
|
|
|
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
-Angela Carter
|
|
|
|
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
-Charlie Chaplin
|
|
|
|
Charlie Chaplin's genius was in comedy. He has no sense of humor, particularly about himself.
-Lita Grey Chaplin
|
|
|
|
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.
-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.
-Ken Dodd
|
|
|
|
The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
|
|
Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.
-Marty Feldman
|
|
|
|
The guy has baggy pants, flat feet, the most miserable, bedraggled-looking little bastard you ever saw; makes itchy gestures as though he's got crabs under his arms -- but he's funny.
-Sterling Ford
|
|
|
|
Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.
-Christopher Fry
|
|
|
|
Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.
-Paul Goodman
|
|
|
|
We mustn't complain too much of being comedians -- it's an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed -- that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.
-Graham Greene
|
|
|
|
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.
-William Hazlitt
|
|
|
|
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
-Ernest Hemingway
|
|
|
|
A pleasant comedy, which paints the manners of the age, and exposes a faithful picture of nature, is a durable work, and is transmitted to the latest posterity. But a system, whether physical or metaphysical, commonly owes its success to its novelty; and is no sooner canvassed with impartiality than its weakness is discovered.
-David Hume
The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, vol. 6, p. 153, Indianapolis (1983)
|
|
|
|
At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.
-Eric Idle
(attributed)
|
|
|
|
Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.
-Eric Idle
|
|
|
|
Comedy comes from conflict, from hatred.
-Warren Mitchell
|
|
|
|
The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.
-George Jean Nathan
|
|
|
|
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.
-Paul Reiser
|
|
Books about Comedy
