Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

The fine line between roaring with laughter and crying because it's a disaster is a very, very fine line. You see a chap slip on a banana skin in the street and you roar with laughter when he falls slap on his backside. If in doing so you suddenly see he's broken a leg, you very quickly stop laughing and it's not a joke anymore.

The problem is that I work in more than one genre. It's impossible for me to aim for a single one because, for me, comedy is mixed with tragedy. That's very Spanish, the way in which comedy and tragedy are inextricable from each other.

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!

I trained in Shakespeare, and that's all comedy, even when it's tragedy.

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.

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

Comedy is tragedy - plus time.

I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.

Why I was so intrigued with Red Skelton was because he was able to make you cry and laugh and the same time. That was power.

His death was the first time that Ed Wynn ever made anyone sad.

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.

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

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

In life, comedy occurs naturally, as it should, in the most appalling of circumstances.

Life is dramatic and comedic at times. Sometimes in the most dramatic situations, there is comedy. And good comedy comes from a sense of reality.

In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.

It's one of the things that 'Everwood' - what makes a great 'Everwood' episode is when it makes you laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time. From the first season, we've always had the chance to deal with death in a very real way, in a way that a lot of other shows can't or don't.

I love Shakespeare and the Greeks - learned a lot studying them at one time.

I think on 'Third Watch' that I was the comic relief on a lot of that. I mean, I definitely had dark moments, but people tended to think he was funny even if the character himself wasn't having a fun time.

In a clown, we see what we do that makes us laugh and cry. I kept the white face, the tradition of the Pierrot. My clown became a romantic and stylized figure. I wanted to be an abstract and concrete figure, a symbol of humanity.

I always felt like the best comedy came out of sadness, and some of my favourite shows growing up - a lot of my influences - have these very sad characters and treat that sadness seriously while also being very funny.

The thing with 'No Man's Land' is not to see it, but how to make people to go to see it. The one negative criticism I've heard is that the relationship between tragedy and comedy is so perfect that it becomes suspicious. I take it as a complement.

When I think about Plastic Man, he was genuinely the first funny super hero. I'm obviously attracted to that. There's also this great mixture of tragedy in there, too, that I love. The humor comes from a place of pain.

To me, when something's really funny, there's, like, a wildness to it, and it's very close to the wildness of something potentially tragic or gross. It's all very close to each other when you have that extreme level of feeling.