Motivational Quotes

Comedy and comedians

The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.

- Wilder, Thornton

Comedy and comedians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Comedy and comedians

Though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve.

Shakespeare, William

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.

Truffaut, Francois

Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.

Goodman, Paul

My routines come out of total unhappiness. My audiences are my group therapy.

Rivers, Joan

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Chaplin, Charlie

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

Bombeck, Erma

In comedy, reconcilement with life comes at the point when to the tragic sense only an inalienable difference or dissension with life appears.

Rourke, Constance

Comedy comes from conflict, from hatred.

Mitchell, Warren

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.

DeGeneres, Ellen

10.

The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it... try to fake three laughs in an hour -- ha ha ha ha ha -- they'll take you away, man. You can't.

Bruce, Lenny

11.

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.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.

Wilder, Thornton

13.

Charlie Chaplin's genius was in comedy. He has no sense of humor, particularly about himself.

Chaplin, Lita Grey

14.

Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.

Feldman, Marty

15.

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

Carter, Angela

16.

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.

Reiser, Paul

17.

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.

Allen, Woody

18.

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.

Allen, Fred A.

19.

I think being funny is not anyone's first choice.

Allen, Woody

20.

And I did laugh sans intermission an hour by his dial. O noble fool, a worthy fool -- motley's the only wear.

Shakespeare, William

21.

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.

Hazlitt, William

22.

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.

Greene, Graham

23.

While awaiting sentencing, I decided to give stand-up comedy a shot. The judge had suggested I get my act together, and I took him seriously.

Allen, Tim

24.

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.

Fry, Christopher

25.

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.

Bruce, Lenny

26.

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.

Thurber, James

27.

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.

Ford, Sterling

28.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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.

Dodd, Ken

30.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

Nathan, George Jean