Florence King Quotes

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

Fear is what makes comedy funny.

And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.

Bryon tilted his head to a very odd angle, half-closed his eyes and composed his features to suggest that he was about to expire from chronic indigestion.

It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius.

Comedy is created when someone is trying very earnestly to do what he feels is the right thing to do at that moment.

For me, if you distill comedy down, it is surprise and the unexpected. That has to be it on its most base level, in any form.

I think that a big part of comedy is being made fun of, and it is looking silly or looking stupid.

Optimism isn't funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. It's exaggeration.

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

Comedically, unpleasantness is great fun.

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

It's almost impossible to be funnier than the people in Washington.

What makes me laugh? Richard Nixon always made me laugh.

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.

No subject is unsuitable for comedy.

People... need a time to laugh. It's up to us to bonk ourselves on the head and slip on a banana peel so the average guy can say, 'I may be bad, honey, but I'm not as much of an idiot as that guy on the screen.'

A sitcom isn't usually the right tool for satire.

Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.

You can parody almost anything.

When you take a character seriously, there's more room for comedy because you're not aware of how absurd you are.

Everything can be satirized.

Humor is everywhere in that there's irony in just about anything a human does.

Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn't funny. It's a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it's not a surprise anymore.

The best jokes resonate because they uncover ridiculousness in our daily lives, reveal the silliness - and sometimes sadness - of things we see every day.