Peter Shaffer Quotes

When Kubrick decided to go the black comedy route with his movie, he thought of me to give it that flavor.

'The Importance of Being Earnest' is important, but it says nothing about anything.

Dark comedy is very difficult. You have to bring the audience in and push them away at the same time.

I prefer comedies when they come from a dark kind of place and have a reality to it.

I would love to be part of dark comedies. I love them! They are no-nonsense, no spoonfeeding, and the norms and cliches are left behind.

I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy.

With Ricky Gervais, it's all shades of wrong, it's my kind of humor.

In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that's a really classic form of humor.

I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy. Making people laugh one moment and the next making them feel really uncomfortable.

I think I've been called edgy - but in all honesty, there is a safety in what I do because I'm always the idiot. Unless you're just listening to buzz words and not taking into account the context of the situation, you see I'm always the ignoramus.

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

'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.

With Portlandia, I don't think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We're okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.

You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.

You might find me outside with a can of hair spray, spraying it with the hope that the sun will burn a hole in the Earth. Another part of me hopes people will grow up and evolve and get smarter. That's the paradox of Marilyn Manson.

What makes me laugh is, of course, the absurd, the horror - anything that upsets me.

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.

Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn't present it as evil but a collection of banalities.

In my comedy, I'm not always trying to say something, but when I'm playing a creepy dude, you're laughing because you know that creepy dude. You've heard that dude say something awful, and I'm just putting a little creative spin on it.

Woody Allen's sense of humour has always attracted me, and I love the way he can make life so meaningful and yet show us what a farce it can be at the same time.

That's what people forget about, is that when things are very, very powerful in a sad way, they have that possibility of also being over-the-top, hysterically funny.

Very few people took sordid things and made comedies out of them.

I tend to find comedy in dark places. I also tend to find comedy in taking on the status quo - which has always been something I find important.

Comedy exists to laugh at things that aren't laughable. But isn't it? That's what separates us from the animals. We laugh.

Taking the humour out of Dickens, it's not Dickens any more.