Ivan Reitman Quotes

Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.

Comedy becomes intensified in short scenes.

I think comedy, so much of it comes out of the strange sort of golden instant 'cause you don't know why it's funny, but you captured it.

I'll accept bad taste in a minute, as long as there's some great comedy minds and performances.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

Like I said, all comedy is based on exaggeration, big or small, whatever you can get away with.

What most readers do not realize is that it takes a particular genius to write funny, to satirize.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

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

A good comedy's very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy.

More eccentric characters can push pretty far, but if you stay on the side of reality, it's always funnier.

I'm not really big on slapstick humor. I like gentle humor.

Sometimes you don't want to be a slapstick clown in order to convey a funny perception of the world.

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

Writing comedy is a superpower.

I always loved jokes. It's such a dumb, facile thing to say, but it's true. I remember being a kid and getting those joke books from the Scholastic Book Club and loving comedy from a very young age.

I'm not a comedian.

I have an incredibly dry sense of humor.

I don't think it's ever easy to be funny. I find it easy to amuse myself with a certain sort of cynical dark humor that tends toward the meaner side, like my character in Happy Gilmore. Those kinds of characters come easily to me.

People don't understand that we're not warriors in their cause. We're a group of people that really feel that they want to write jokes about the absurdity that we see in government and the world and all that, and that's it.

Humorists of the 'mere' sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration.

The next best thing to a very good joke is a very bad one.

Playing on stereotypes was meant to be humorous. If it doesn't tickle you in certain spots, it's not going to be funny. Falling down the stairs is a seriously dangerous thing, but watching it is HILARIOUS!

My persona is most importantly just to communicate the material in a way that is most funny and meaningful in the moment. It's more like a character that's sculpted for whatever joke needs communicating at the moment.

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.