Joan Rivers Quotes

Comedy is tragedy revisited.

[Comedy] is an escape from illusions. The audience is...thinking, 'This bullshit we see and hear all day makes no sense.'

I think you can tell the human condition better through comedy.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

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'm always going to do whatever I think is funniest. If something's dark, I'll do it. If it's a sock puppet, if it's a stool, I'll do it.

I think comedy's often the little and the large, isn't it?

Comedy is what happens when you cross the dateline from the unbearable. Things become so unbearable they become a joke.

Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.

Humor is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.

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

When you take a character seriously, there's more room for comedy because you're not aware of how absurd you are.

Funny is as funny does, and funny puts on a walrus mask and slowly gyrates in a mall food court. I laugh at absurdity hardest, then stories, then observations, then bearded men on roller skates.

Comedy arises out of necessity, because some things are so dark that you have to laugh about it.

Comedy is surprises, so if you're intending to make somebody laugh and they don't laugh, that's funny.

I know the new comedy god is surrealism, but it doesn't touch my heart.

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

I think comedy is the perfect vehicle for that which is slightly beyond life.

It's both funny and sad which seem to me to be the two basic ingredients of good comedy.

The first purpose of comedy is to make people laugh. Anything deeper is a bonus. Some comedians want to make people laugh and make them think about socially relevant issues, but comedy, by the very nature of the word, is to make people laugh. If people aren't laughing, it's not comedy. It's as simple as that.

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.

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

All comedy is funny because it tells us truths that we recognise through laughter, but that doesn't mean it can't be unnerving. Think of 'Fawlty Towers'; it can be very, very dark, but by God, it's funny. The two things are not in opposition.

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