Mario Monicelli Quotes

My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'

I'm not temperamentally into high comedy. I'm not a Noel Coward kind of girl.

The more cerebral, slightly darker comedy stuff is where I love to live.

What makes me laugh is, of course, the absurd, the horror - anything that upsets me.

To me, most comedy is dark comedy.

Loads of stuff that I've done has always had a hint of comedy. I did this show called 'Psychoville' that's a horror-comedy. Because I just think that's what life's like.

I would love to be part of dark comedies. I love them! They are no-nonsense, no spoonfeeding, and the norms and cliches are left behind.

Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.

I think the best comedy is tragicomic. Yeah, I suppose if you were to look at everything I've done, there is a bit of a black streak through all of it. It's not deliberate: it's what makes me laugh, and there's a fine tradition of it, especially in Ireland.

The best comedy, I feel, comes in a drama because it balances each other out.

I don't really find things funny unless they're deeply tragic at the same time. I think if you're funny just for the sake of being funny, it's just frivolous nonsense. To me, all the best comic plays have been written about really serious and rather bleak things.

There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.

Although Kurt Vonnegut may not be considered a humor writer, 'Breakfast of Champions' is one of the funniest books I've ever read.

I think comedy is drama, often. It's hard to have comedy over a period of time - commercials are one thing, but over a period of time - comedy and tragedy go hand in hand.

I like dark comedies. That's why I like the Wayans Brothers.

Why do we laugh at such terrible things? Because comedy is often the sarcastic realization of inescapable tragedy.

The comedy in 'Star Trek' is always very subtle, if it's there at all.

When Kubrick decided to go the black comedy route with his movie, he thought of me to give it that flavor.

Comedy tends to come out of things which are quite painful and serious.

I think the way comedy is represented on screen is it's either all fart jokes - and it's just laughter for the sake of laughter - or it's one of those things where it's just kind of very preachy, very heavy-handed.

I think 'Paper Moon' is a comedy-drama. 'What's Up, Doc?' was the most severe comedy, but my favorite film of my own is 'They All Laughed,' which is a kind of bittersweet comedy.

Much of the best humor is found in the frequently tragic reality of human experience.

Great comedy is always sadistic.

All comedy is funny because it tells us truths that we recognise through laughter, but that doesn't mean it can't be unnerving. Think of 'Fawlty Towers'; it can be very, very dark, but by God, it's funny. The two things are not in opposition.