Steve Carell Quotes

I never understand when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it - as 'Salesman' does, as 'King Lear' does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.

I always found that drama, really good drama, has a lot of comedy in it.

Comedy needs to happen naturally and be in touch with the character. When you see that guy in your office that everybody laughs at, he doesn't think he's funny. He's just being him, and that's the joke.

I've always littered my songs with jokes. You might need to dig a little deeper to find the humor, but I would totally object to being some kind of distraught personality. I've never tried to attach myself to that.

I don't steer towards anything. I steer towards character and truth. If it's funny then so be it. If it's dramatic, so be it. I just steer towards characters.

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.'

A really good comedy, I think, is played as if it was real, and it's the circumstances that make it amusing. And I think that the - the inverse or the reverse is true for drama.

I always wanted to make something that was real and had heart and was funny.

As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.

The bottom line of comedy is to be funny, and the bottom line of drama is to be truthful. You can be truthful and funny, but if you're not truthful in a drama than the audience leaves you.

You could begin to notice whenever you find yourself blaming others or justifying yourself. If you spent the rest of your life just noticing that and letting it be a way to uncover the silliness of the human condition-the tragic yet comic drama that we all continually buy into-you could develop a lot of wisdom and a lot of kindness as well as a great sense of humor.

You know, you should start to be in plays and things like that. Write some scripts. If you're an artist and you truly don't believe what you're spittin' then you need to really seriously be an actor then.

I have a lot of people in my life who are truly ridiculous characters, and they're very, very funny people, but they don't really try to be. They're not cracking jokes.

When you are younger, you pretend to believe, but you are proving it to everyone and to yourself. The change comes when you know you're funny on the inside. Then you don't have to prove it to anybody else anymore. That's when you become different and that's when you evolved onto a completely different level, because you know who you are.

I naturally think in terms of comedy whenever I see anything because tragedy is so close to comedy, so I like to add the tragedy to the comedy or a little bit of comedy to the tragedy in order to make them both feel more real to me.

I think Georges Feydeau said comedy is just tragedy speeded up.

The secret to comedy is not playing the comedy, but actually playing the situation, playing the drama of it.

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character that we play.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

You can't have good comedy without drama in it.

Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.

It's a sick thing, right: people are afraid of public speaking. I do public speaking, except my public speaking involves the audience only having one type of emotion and one type of reaction. If they have anything other than laughter, it's a failure. That's an absurd thing for a human to try to seek. The main thing to realize is that whatever I say, it's my truth and I believe in it, and if I don't get a laugh off that, then it's not working.

With comedy, you have to do it right. In a drama, there's a lot of different ways to succeed in a moment. But comedy comes from reality. You can't try to be funny.