Johan Huizinga Quotes

Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.

I used to love comic books, and I love American comedy, and neither are afraid to tackle big themes.

I think a playful critique is good for all of us, and that's basically how I see satire functioning. But I'm not interested in a kind of contemptuous satirical vision; I try always, even when I'm knowingly being satirical, to also be humane, but I mean, let's face it: there's plenty in American life to make fun of, and we all participate in it.

If you've never seen me perform live, I'm a must-see. I'm very funny. I have a different perspective sometimes on a lot of what I do and the world itself, especially America.

I think the job of a comedian is to make people laugh, but also challenge them to laugh at things they didn't know they could until now.

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.

Comedy is there to basically show us we fart, we laugh, to make us realize we still are part animal.

A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.

Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.

She [Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook.

Comedy is very strange to me and I don't fully understand it's purpose or function.

The only award I've been nominated for is a Scottish BAFTA. A Scottish BAFTA, it's like hearing that the animals have their own Olympics. You hear all this stuff about TV being faked. Of course it's faked. It's all faked. That documentary a couple of weeks ago about tribal warfare among monkeys, that was all filmed in a Yates wine lodge in Dundee. Comic Relief is faked. Everybody in Africa is fine.

A lot of comics just joke around, but it's just as important to get the truth out there.

Laughter is a celebration of our failings. That's what clowns are for. And that's what I am.

Knowing comedy is knowing human nature.

The only way to get a serious message across is through comedy

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

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

For me, it's important to elevate the hypocrisy with humor. Then you really are using the humor to elevate the problem, saying this is why it matters, and then saying we can combine the work together with laughing and being around joyful people and helping out. So the comedy sometimes can actually full-on expose the issue, but also it's a gathering tool. It serves a lot of purposes.

Sixteen years I've pounded my head against the mentality of America, which...I'd say it's about an 8th grade emotional level.

Ridicule is the deadliest weapon of the age.

Comedy is a great tool. We [comics] are trying to find ways to use humor to enlighten people without preaching to them.

I seem to be able to get away with pun strips if I add a panel at the end where I somehow indicate that I know it's a bad pun.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture. It's one thing to mess stuff up and break stuff, but [Borat] is really pointing out the ideology of America. It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.