John Baldessari Quotes

That word 'funny' always makes me feel uncomfortable. Because if I were trying to be funny, I would be something like Bill Wegman - he really tries to be funny. I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter, and I'm sort of reporting.

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.

Part of being a comedian is that it's your job to look at life and regurgitate it in a funny way, to point out its absurdities.

One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At 'The New Yorker', we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind - Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for communicating ideas. Not editorial comment, but observation.

I see the absurdity in things, and I think it's my job to point it out.

I think I was born with a natural way of looking at something and trying to find the ways in which it was odd or funny, Even in the sad or angry stuff, I was, 'Well, but where is the funny part of this?'

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.

Humor is reason gone mad.

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

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 always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don't really need a distinction between them.

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.

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.

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

Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.

The energy in a comedy is very serious. Somebody said comedy is a tragedy plus time. When you have a tragedy, for example, like this, like, 'We're going to die,' and you have time, like, five hours to die, it becomes a comedy.

I've heard too many times where people say that I'm this ultra-serious guy. In truth, I've got an extremely absurd sense of humor. I thrive on the absurd - I love it.

To listen to your own silence is the key to comedy.

Actually being funny is mostly telling the truth about things.

Most jokes state a bitter truth.

I have always found humor in places where humor wasn't necessarily intended.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh.

What makes me laugh is, of course, the absurd, the horror - anything that upsets me.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

Being an outsider helps breed comedy.