Paul Lynde Quotes

Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It's sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn't the star.

Comedy is unusual people in real situations; farce is real people in unusual situations.

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

At the end of the day I'm writing comedy. If you get too realistic as a comedy writer with your disasters, it stops being funny.

I've been around long enough now that people who don't get into the outrageousness, the over-the-top stuff, they know not to buy my books anymore.

In a satire, you need foolishness.

Humor is reason gone mad.

What's fun about comedy is you're pushing things a little further than you would in a drama; you're pushing reality a little bit more.

In the best farce today we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move logically enough to the ending.

Everything can be satirized.

When I write, I create really absurd situations which become false because I am after the joke.

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.

I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.

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

I always try to keep in mind that while the characters in a farce may find themselves in outrageous dilemmas, and may behave in a way that the audience finds amusing, the characters themselves don't have the consolation of knowing they're in a comedy.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

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

It is difficult not to write satire.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.

'Discworld' is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

Madness isn't altogether a bad thing in comedy.

When you have satire, it has to be real. No matter how outrageous the comedy becomes, you have to believe in the characters.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

You can't satirise darts, because it's hyper-real as it is; there's already enough over-the-top madness to it.