H. L. Mencken Quotes

Comedy is brutal. It's powerful, though.

It's easier to rip somebody to shreds while you're making them laugh.

I think comedy and satire are the strongest ways to deal with very serious themes and very painful themes.

It's just my natural way - to be funny. I don't know why that is. But as I've said, humor is a quick cover for shock, horror, confusion. The critics hate funny writers for the most part. They think funny is not serious, but I think that funny can be even more serious than nonfunny. And it can be more affecting, too.

It's rare in satirical comedy not just to be cynical.

With comedy, I try to steer toward, you know, talking about people that do crazy things, messed-up things. That's what I like to talk about.

"How could you think of such awful things?" liberal critics always ask. "How else could I possibly amuse myself?" I always wonder.

Satire is tragedy plus time.

When you see somebody walking down the street wearing a Superman t-shirt, you just want to shoot them in the chest ... when they start to bleed go, I guess not

"Have you heard any Stockhausen?" Beecham was asked. "No, but I believe I have stepped in some."

A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn't really need to practice any more because they had got so good at it.

I saw a guy wearing a "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelet and a Lance Armstrong bracelet, and he went up to this blind kid and rubbed his eyes, and the kid could see. But he wasn't used to the light, 'cause it was bright, and he walked into traffic and was killed instantly. Okay, the people that are laughing right now? I'm gonna call you guys half-full. Because you're focusing on the important part of the story: the bracelets are working.

It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.

Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Becca maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children.

I mean, sometimes we do do that, The National Anthem was a caustic satire and sometimes that's the way to go with the story rather than me being particularly misanthropic.

I am billed as a humorist, but of course I am a tragedian at heart.

It's always harder satirize what you like rather than what you dislike.

"Uh-huh," I said. "Because all you mad, evil scientists sit around whipping up batches of Pillsbury's finest during your coffee breaks. I mean, this is pathetic."

You can keep your Streisands.

From Lucifer to Jerry Sneak there is not an aspect of evil, imperfection, and littleness which can elude the lights of humor or the lightning of wit.

Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

We all need to be mocked from time to time, lest we take ourselves too seriously.

And here, I believe, the wit is generally misunderstood. In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your a-- for having just before threatened to kick his; for I have observed very accurately, that no one ever desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another.

Dear old al-Maarri was a great skeptic poet. He wrote a parody of the Koran, and his friends would tease him and say, "al-Maarri, but no one says your Koran." And he said, "Yes, but give me time. Give me time. If people recite it for twenty years it will become as popular as the other one."