Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Comedy.
Your boss loves your ideas ... it's you he doesn't care about.
Steven Charles
The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible...Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work.
C.S. Lewis
I didn't wait for Luck. I raced after it with a truck.
A.A. Bell
Either to die the death or to abjureFor ever the society of men.Therefore, fair Hermia, question your desires;Know of your youth, examine well your blood,Whether, if you yield not to your father's choice,You can endure the livery of a nun,For aye to be in shady cloister mew'd,To live a barren sister all your life,Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.Thrice-blessed they that master so their blood,To undergo such maiden pilgrimage;But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd,Than that which withering on the virgin thornGrows, lives and dies in single blessedness.
William Shakespeare
QUINCEFrancis Flute, the bellows-mender.FLUTEHere, Peter Quince.QUINCEFlute, you must take Thisby on you.FLUTEWhat is Thisby? a wandering knight?QUINCEIt is the lady that Pyramus must love.FLUTENay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming.
A farce or comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home.
Abraham Lincoln
I don't love comedy but I can watch someone who's kind of interesting forever. I think a waitress who's having a bad day is a lot more fun than Robin Williams doing forty minutes of material.
Bruce McCulloch
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
Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.
Erma Bombeck
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
And I must draft an advertisement for the Daily Prophet, too,' he added thoughtfully. 'We'll be needing a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher.... Dear me, we do seem to run through them, don't we?
J.K. Rowling
Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. and yet... and yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.
Terry Pratchett
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
Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.
Christopher Fry
Comedy comes from conflict, from hatred.
Warren Mitchell
In comedy, reconcilement with life comes at the point when to the tragic sense only an inalienable difference or dissension with life appears.
Constance Rourke
A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take over every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.
Stephen King
It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth a dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and, just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.
Charles Dickens
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
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 Engla
