Christopher Hitchens Quotes

life becomes satire in real time, what good is the premiere satire magazine? It might as well just be the newspaper. You could pick up The Wall Street Journal and be like, "Oh, what a funny Onion headline!" And then the editor of The Onion is like, "Huh. I guess you won't be needing me anymore."

No subject is unsuitable for comedy.

A sitcom isn't usually the right tool for satire.

You can parody almost anything.

Everything can be satirized.

Satire is fascinating stuff. It's deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it's the only thing that makes any sense.

I haven't watched 'Mad TV' a lot, but I have seen some stuff on there that is truly funny. You have to have some sort of attitude toward the subject, and they seem to have it. It depends on how much blood you want to draw.

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

The thing is, comedy's gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness.

How many people here have telekenetic powers? Raise my hand.

I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.

I want to see Brian Williams with no irony wearing a mustache.

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

But in terms of satire and comedy, our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine.

I think at its best the American sense of humor is the same as the British sense of humor at its best, which is to be wry and ironic and self deprecating.

Hypocrisy is great fodder for comedy.

The pun exists in a social and political void, caring nothing for the issues of its day, content merely to display itself in its small cleverness.

It is difficult not to write satire.

It just happened that the public happened to, uh, appreciate the satirical quality of these crazy things.

Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.

We all know how funny Morrissey is. Actually, you know what? I say that sarcastically. His songs are some of the funniest songs I've ever heard in my life. I mean, really. I mean, not that the 'Girlfriend in a Coma' is, like, really funny.

I think great humor lies in playing the truth of a situation.

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

In the end, everything is a gag.

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.