Dennis Lehane Quotes

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

It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius.

Everything is ironic to me. There are moments I find hysterical, but I'm probably the only one who would find that, except for a few people.

I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way.

Anything that was perverse and silly would be Kids in the Hall.

My dad's sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal - his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.

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.

Absurdity is my favorite brand of humor because deep down inside, in our subconscious, it's all surrealism. It's all abstract. The world is the surrealism, the absurdity, the humor - it all just overlaps.

We have a need to make people laugh at things they'd never thought about, make them laugh at things that aren't logical.

I love comedy that seems kind of a little bit absurd.

Everything is funny, if you can laugh at it.

I said to the waitress, "There's a fly swimming in my soup." She said: "You've got too much soup - he should only be able to paddle."

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

Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.

For me, if you distill comedy down, it is surprise and the unexpected. That has to be it on its most base level, in any form.

If a song is funny and absurd, and it sounds great, it's just going to be that much funnier. And there's no better example of that than 'Monty Python.'

In my opinion, I think sarcasm and humor in a song, without turning it into a novelty song, is really charming.

Sometimes a witticism has no truth behind it.

I've always thought something that makes you laugh, it makes you laugh because there's a little bit of truth to it.

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

Only the pun remains. The pun, beloved of Shakespeare, children and tabloid headline-writers, is normally eschewed in the modern, sophisticated circles in which I move.

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

What makes me laugh? Richard Nixon always made me laugh.

Puns are a form of humor with words.

There are three kinds of people in this world: 1) People who make lists, 2) People who don't make lists, and 3) People who carve tiny Nativity scenes out of pecan hulls. I'm sorry, there isn't really a third category; it's just that a workable list needs a minimum of three items, I feel.