Lynn Shelton Quotes

We're kind of the comic relief of this movie because most of the stories are very dark. And that's why these plays were so great, because it's such a dark, dark universe that it becomes funny because it's just too pathetic.

I love down-and-dirty and grit. But I do think that my favorite dramas are ones that are dark comedies because I think that the only way the audience and the actor can really go as dark and deep as you may want to go is if there's some levity added to it.

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.

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

I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.

I think comedy can be a way of sugar-coating a pill that needs to be taken, and whatever I complain about onstage, I hope I justify the negativity by using humour to make the point.

As a comedian, I am attracted to truths that are uncomfortable. I like funny bummers.

Humor is the only way to tell a story. Especially the dark ones.

When you're laughing aloud at David Sedaris' every sentence, it's easy to miss the more serious side of what he's up to.

I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy.

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

I'd have to say that my favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning. 'Little Miss Sunshine' is like that. That's my fave genre, if I had to pick one.

Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor.

Humor is very interesting to me. My films are not comedies, but there's comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life.

I like a person who knows how to say something dark at a very dark moment. The darker the moment and the darker the comic, the better. Something that is so wrong on all levels.

I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.

I have to be entertained by what I'm writing, so a lot of my stuff has a goofiness or scatological quality. If these characters can entertain me, then I feel like I can deal with the darker or more serious stuff.

When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

I would say most comedians have a very cynical worldview of the way the world can work. It's almost like if you didn't, you couldn't be a comedian.

As you know it is a comedy so everything is a little bit pushed. That's what's funny about this kind of movie is you can laugh about the absurdity, and the bad side of life.

There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them.

The energy in a comedy is very serious. Somebody said comedy is a tragedy plus time. When you have a tragedy, for example, like this, like, 'We're going to die,' and you have time, like, five hours to die, it becomes a comedy.

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.