Terry Pratchett Quotes

People say the comedy is so shocking, but if you read newspapers or look around generally - I mean, obviously I'm not writing about all the lovely things that there are, which I do see as well - but there is a lot of outrageousness around, slightly covered up. And obviously, it's fun to take that a little bit further.

With Portlandia, I don't think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We're okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.

In a satire, you need foolishness.

In comedy, falling means laughter. You can take something sacred and make it silly. The more sacred it is, the funnier it is. It has a bigger drop to fall.

When I'm writing the book I'm laughing at just how overblown the characters seemed. How full of himself he seems. But I didn't get far enough in the series to really drive the joke of it home.

With anything you put out there, you're going to offend somebody, but most people get that it's a joke, that I'm playing a character, and that I'm actually making fun of what I'm saying by saying it.

You can parody almost anything.

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

Everything can be satirized.

I didn't necessarily set out to think of a show to make fun of reality shows.

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

One day there were two out in the ninth, and I hit a pop fly so high that the fans got tired of waiting for it to come down. So they all went home and listened to it drop by turning on the radio.

As you know it is a comedy so everything is a little bit pushed. That's what's funny about this kind of movie is you can laugh about the absurdity, and the bad side of life.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

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.

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

Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.

Ksenia Sobchak as president is like Sergei Shnurov as an artist. It's satire. It's a very high-level art project.

If you're satirizing something, you're hitting at something that's real and true, and putting it on its head, and we did that with 'Tropic Thunder.'

I exaggerate all our selves, our beings. I make fun of everything: of our life and what we are. But I don't tell jokes, really. I just exaggerate life, and it comes out funny.

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

When you get the high art of William Shakespeare and the greatest love story ever told, and you collision crash it with the low art of the tacky garden gnome, you're going to have lots and lots of opportunity for fun and putting your tongue very firmly in your cheek.

If written with enough care and thoughtfulness, a joke can make you laugh at a belief you hold dear.

Louie Anderson thinks my thing is the absurdness of reality. That's what we do on 'Portlandia' all the time. I try to bring that absurdness of reality to everything.