Terry Pratchett Quotes

I don't really find things funny unless they're deeply tragic at the same time. I think if you're funny just for the sake of being funny, it's just frivolous nonsense. To me, all the best comic plays have been written about really serious and rather bleak things.

The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.

I think Britain has this tradition which suggests that if you make the readers laugh too much, you can't really be serious. Whereas, I think one of the functions laughter can perform in a book, as in life, is that it's a reaction to genuine horror.

I like a person who knows how to say something dark at a very dark moment. The darker the moment and the darker the comic, the better. Something that is so wrong on all levels.

I like dark comedies. That's why I like the Wayans Brothers.

Someone once said that to make a regular person laugh, you need to dress a guy up like an old lady and push him down the stairs. To make a comedy writer laugh, you have to push a real old lady down the stairs. I don't know who that's attributed to. I think it's Aristophanes. Or Catherine the Great.

My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.

'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.

Dark comedy is very difficult. You have to bring the audience in and push them away at the same time.

I think if they put a laugh track on 'Intervention,' it would be funny.

Any film which views the darker side of life, which is death with a sense of humor, is very much to my taste.

Believe it or not, there's a lot of humor in 'Mad Men.' Especially in the dark moments.

'War on Everyone,' I think... the script was hilarious to me, but it's very dark, dark humor. It's super dark.

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

I prefer comedies when they come from a dark kind of place and have a reality to it.

All comedy is funny because it tells us truths that we recognise through laughter, but that doesn't mean it can't be unnerving. Think of 'Fawlty Towers'; it can be very, very dark, but by God, it's funny. The two things are not in opposition.

To me, most comedy is dark comedy.

I find heartbreaking stuff really funny.

I love down-and-dirty and grit. But I do think that my favorite dramas are ones that are dark comedies because I think that the only way the audience and the actor can really go as dark and deep as you may want to go is if there's some levity added to it.

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

My wife is Swedish, so I'm familiar with the Scandinavian kind of odd humor. It's very dark and very deadpan.

I can't speak for everyone, but the kind of comedy that makes me laugh are the ones that kind of make me cringe, and kind of make me look inside my own fears, my own anxieties.

I like dark humor. I think the world is very funny and tragic, and my photographs are basically dark Jewish humor.

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

I would love to be part of dark comedies. I love them! They are no-nonsense, no spoonfeeding, and the norms and cliches are left behind.