Dana Carvey Quotes

Humor is reason gone mad.

The best way to make the most serious point in the world is to be as unserious as possible.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

Comedy is exaggerated realism. It can be stretched to the almost ludicrous, but it must always be believable.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Comedically, unpleasantness is great fun.

I like that kind of 'straight-faced' comedy. I like to be straight-faced and outrageous.

I grew up in an environment of jokes and sarcasm and puns. I talk that way, so I write that way.

You're entering dangerous land when you start theorising about comedy.

I'm not temperamentally into high comedy. I'm not a Noel Coward kind of girl.

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 have to be entertained by what I'm writing, so a lot of my stuff has a goofiness or scatological quality. If these characters can entertain me, then I feel like I can deal with the darker or more serious stuff.

If I can't see the humor in it, how am I going to be funny?

The best jokes resonate because they uncover ridiculousness in our daily lives, reveal the silliness - and sometimes sadness - of things we see every day.

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

Louis CK knows that just because a joke is using space as a resource instead of something to be crammed like a hamper, this doesn't mean a story isn't happening.

I try to write as serious as possible, and then a joke slips in.

To be honest, I don't know how comedy works.

I think the main thing about comedy and humor is that it's impossible and always was impossible to define.

One of my biggest problems with comedy was that I did not understand some of the jokes.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

I'm not the comedy police, but you watch a movie, and everyone's laughing, and then you shake it out, and you realize, 'There's no joke there!'

Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth.

You can analyse a joke and say it's funny because this guy thought this was going to happen, and that happened, and it's surprising. But not all surprising things are funny.