Quotes about "Humor & Comedy"

I remember when humor was gentle pokes. I used to call it 'arm around the shoulder' humor. Now they go for the jugular and they take no prisoners. It's mean, mean stuff. ”

If you elect a matinee idol mayor, you're going to have a musical comedy administration. ”

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet. ”

One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At 'The New Yorker', we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind - Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for communicating ideas. Not editorial comment, but observation. ”

The line between humor and bad taste is your audience, in which some people will find everything offensive, and some people will find nothing offensive, but the truth is that most humor originates in what would be called bad taste. ”

The interesting thing about humor is that in humor, you - in logic, something is A or not A. In humor, it's both A and not A. ”

Humor levels the playing field. I understood that early on - that was something I had. ”

There's public humor, and there's private humor, and they're all appropriate in their own way, and you shouldn't - just as you wouldn't have a megaphone and say certain things that you would say around your friends - things that are perfectly all right within your close social group with whom you share a certain context. ”

I think funny is just the foundation. I don't really think, to some extent, funny is the absolute most important thing. It should also communicate some idea through the medium of cartooning. Just to be funny is... You know what, the things that you laugh hardest at aren't cartoons. ”

If all you have is satire, your show will close. Even if all you have is comedy, your show will close. The hardest thing is not making people laugh: the hardest thing is building an emotional story. Any child can make a group of adults laugh. ”