Comedy Quotes

God writes a lot of comedy… the trouble is, he’s stuck with so many bad actors who don’t know how to play funny.

The more one suffers, the more, I believe, one has a sense of the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires the authority in the art of the comic.

Comedy is like bass fishing. Everyone is an expert, the fish is smarter than all of them, and the flashiest, shiniest lures never work.

It’s very much easier to be tragic than it is to be comic. I have known people who embrace the tragic view of life, and it is a cop-out. They simply feel rotten about everything, and that is terribly easy.

In comedy there are only two main parts. He who slaps and he who gets slapped.

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

It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.

He (Lenny Bruce) always suffered from verbal disabilities: a tendency to singsong, a habit of mumbling, a coy and uncomfortable relation with the mike. Only late at night, when he was working to a very hip crowd could he ever attain the energy level of the parent style. When he did, though, he produced the […]

Never had he (Lenny Bruce) achieved more perfectly his ideal of coming on like an oral jazzman. He didn’t want laughter anymore, he hated applause – ‘Please don’t applaud!’ he would beg. ‘It breaks my rhythm!’ – he just wanted to get so far down into his own head that he felt that he was […]

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