Mallory Ortberg Quotes

I think comedy has to come from a real place. It has to come from an honest place.

I suppose I look for humor in most situations because it humanizes things; it makes a character much more three-dimensional if there's some kind of humor. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud type of stuff, just a sense that there is a humorous edge to things. I do like that.

Actually being funny is mostly telling the truth about things.

I am trying to work out what my taste is, comedy-wise. I look up to stand up comedians who appear to be telling the truth, but I don't mind if they are lying.

To be a comedian, you have to have some darkness behind it. I certainly draw on my past, and it helps.

Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you're the funniest person you've ever heard of.

And I think comedy obviously a great way to get a message out because you know the reason why things are funny is because they're true.

What all my favorite comedians have in common is extraordinary honesty.

As I get older, my sense of humor is my biggest asset.

You can be funny and say what you mean; these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Some of the best jokes came from people who meant it. See: Pryor, Bruce, Carlin, etc.

I've always thought something that makes you laugh, it makes you laugh because there's a little bit of truth to it.

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

I think comedy stems from being honest, often painfully so. I hope I can achieve that perspective in my own life and also have fun.

Comedy is all about having a point of view, and it's also about power.

I think you have to have a sense of humor about every movie that you're doing. Your character needs to be relatable in a way that, even when you're doing the most bizarre things, sometimes a bit of tongue in cheek is necessary to keep up the believability of it.

Everything is ironic to me. There are moments I find hysterical, but I'm probably the only one who would find that, except for a few people.

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not.

I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.

Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.

You shouldn't get too close to the truth, because then maybe you stop being funny.

David Sedaris is so good that it makes me mad.

We have a curious relationship with 'funny' in the U.K. We love to laugh, but we also think that making people laugh is just a little bit second-tier, especially in a literary context.

I think one of the big things about comedy is the ability for the audience to identify.

If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.

To do something funny, you have to have experienced it in real life and digested it in a way that amuses you.