Stephen Mangan Quotes

I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.

I think you can tell the human condition better through comedy.

Comedy arises out of necessity, because some things are so dark that you have to laugh about it.

Much of the best humor is found in the frequently tragic reality of human experience.

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

Satire is tragedy plus time.

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.

Sometimes in the most tragic situation, something just profoundly funny happens.

We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

Many comedians have a dark side that lets them take a negative thing and turn it funny.

The difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy is something awful happening to somebody else, while comedy is something awful happening to somebody else.

Perhaps naively I thought people understand what humor was, that it was invented by the human race to cope with the dark areas of life, problems and terrors.

When I was a playwright earlier in my career - my senior project in high school was my first produced play - I used to put on the title page: 'A tragedy with laughs.'

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

Humor is hostility.

People find the humor in life all the time. And you have to in order to make it through real life. Like, some things are tragic, but you have to laugh.

'Ray Donovan' is very dark and very serious. As actors will tell you, the darker and more serious the material, the more jokes that go around set. It's a counterbalance.

Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.

I think comedy and satire are the strongest ways to deal with very serious themes and very painful themes.

Humor is the only way to tell a story. Especially the dark ones.

In my own mind, I can joke about anything.

You can find humor in most things, and even terrible things.