John Smith Quotes

Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

I've always said people say on a dramatic show, 'I was crying. It was so emotional when he went and grabbed that little girl from a burning building and handed her over to her mother.' In comedy, the best thing you can say is, 'I think it's funny.'

You cannot have the drama without comedy.

Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it.

All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

When I was a playwright earlier in my career - my senior project in high school was my first produced play - I used to put on the title page: 'A tragedy with laughs.'

I think that there's a fine line between comedy and drama.

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

Tragedy is the oldest form of theatre.

I think it would be exhausting and depressing, to write, to watch and to live, if it was just focused on drama. It's heavy. Also, I think the humor really highlights the pathos and the struggle. You can slam it up against drama, and it makes both shine.

In movies, comedy and tragedy are all the same.

The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which everyone is married in the last act.

Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.

I naturally think in terms of comedy whenever I see anything because tragedy is so close to comedy, so I like to add the tragedy to the comedy or a little bit of comedy to the tragedy in order to make them both feel more real to me.

You can't have good comedy without drama in it.

I think that you can make a drama and have it be intensely funny, and vice versa.

I like drama as well. When I played Hamlet, I got one review that said, "This must surely be the funniest Hamlet in history," but schoolgirls would still cry when he died.

I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.

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

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

I try to find humor in everything I do, because I think all great plays - even great tragedies - have enormous humor in them.

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

I never understand when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it - as 'Salesman' does, as 'King Lear' does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.