Colin Firth Quotes

Comedy is exaggerated realism. It can be stretched to the almost ludicrous, but it must always be believable.

Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.

Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.

There is certainly a higher percentage of wit in British comedy than in American comedy. What always tickles me is the way in which people try to use their intellect to get themselves out of tricky situations but never quite manage to do so - much to their enormous embarrassment.

When you take a character seriously, there's more room for comedy because you're not aware of how absurd you are.

Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.

Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.

My favorite kind of humor is basically, if it was happening to you, it wouldn't be funny, but to observe it, it's hilarious.

If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.

In good comedy, the structure comes from truth and that weird eye that looks at the way life is.

There's something grounded about 'Ugly Americans,' so I think it's good that I'm playing a version of myself in these elevated cartoon circumstances.

Comedy is drama. I think that if your characters are feeling something that is very real, then they have to respond in a way that feels real to them, and some situations, the only response you could possibly have is to respond in a way that's so extreme that people are going to laugh.

Perhaps naively I thought people understand what humor was, that it was invented by the human race to cope with the dark areas of life, problems and terrors.

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

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

Secretly we're all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.

There are really two types of laughter on the part of the spectator. There is the laughter of recognition - which means seeing things you're familiar with and laughing at yourself. But there's also hysterical laughter - a way of dealing with the things we see that upset us.

There's nothing funnier than the human animal.

I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I'd lay my cards down on that, and say that it's that that I'm trying to do.

I think we're the only jokeless show on television. I mean really, we have no setups and no punch lines. It's not a joke show. There are funny lines and funny moments but again the comedy is born of the human experience and awkward pauses are a great part of what it is to be human.

I have never knowingly, I swear to God, written satire. The word connotes exaggeration of the foibles of mankind. To me, mankind just has foibles. You don't have to push it!

All people are sad clowns. That's the key to comedy - and it's a buffer against reality.

Unfortunately, I was making comedies in my 20s, but other people didn't realize they were comedies.

So much comedy comes out of an earnest, deeply rooted need for one thing or another, trying to get it and caring so much that you lose your sense of self-awareness.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to make fun of yourself and to do it in a way that sort of preserves your dignity but, at the same time, lets you play the theater of the absurd.