Stephen Leacock Quotes

I think seeing Pryor's first movie, Live In Concert, when I was in high school changed my life. Pryor really put the heart in darkness for me.

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

Different things made 'Cheers' and 'Frasier' special. Both of them, though, were honest. It was the old Shakespeare thing: Hold the mirror up to life.

All great humorists are sad... I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest - the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.

The worst in life, we are told, is compatible with the best in art. So too the worst in life is compatible with the best in humour.

It's quite easy to make a load of people laugh, it's often a reflex action, but I think to make them cry is harder without manipulating them.

Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears!

From the moment you entered this world of existence, a ladder was put in front of you so you could escape.

This world has few redeeming features, and one is the capacity for people to love one another with great, enduring passion.

Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.

You can perceive life as tragic, or you can laugh at the tragedy of it and that turns it into comedy. It doesn't change the circumstances.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.

In real life, bad things happen and they're not funny, and then bad things happen and they can be funny. When you're unhappy you don't go an entire time without laughing. You don't go your whole life without laughing. It's just life.

Two things people throughout history have had in common are hatred and humour. I am proud that I have been able to use humour to lessen people's hatred.

A comedy ends with a wedding, and a tragedy ends with a funeral: you always have to juxtapose sex and death.

People come to my shows and know that they're going to hear about what's going on in the world - what's happening at the moment. My material is as new as anything on the dinner table.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

I love comedies. I take comedy very seriously as a form. It's a serious form, involving a certain way of looking at life, specifically the painful aspects of life. I get asked, "How can you have such failures in your films?" Well, what else is life about? There's some sense of constant failure in something. Humor gives you a distance from it.

Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also.

Whenever you find humour, you find pathos close by its side.

A thin line separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt. Our lives constantly walk that line. When we slip off on one side or the other, we're taken by surprise. But who said there wouldn't be surprises? Knowing God just means that all the rules will be fair; at the end of our life drama, we'll see that. We never know how things will turn out, but if we know with certainty they will make sense regardless of how they turn out, we're on to something.

We are unusual and tragic and alive.