John Mortimer Quotes

I love comedy that seems kind of a little bit absurd.

What I really want to do is to write a hilarious farce.

I like really stupid comedies.

I guess I don't have much interest in writing straight drama. So whatever subject matter I choose will ultimately be dealt with in a comic way.

Comedy is unusual people in real situations; farce is real people in unusual situations.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

In terms of pure comedic value, 'Tootsie' is brilliant.

It's both funny and sad which seem to me to be the two basic ingredients of good comedy.

Hollywood comedy has gotten really silly and absurd, and I like that.

An old-codger comedy - that's what I want to do.

I think all good drama is funny. All the best drama is ultimately very funny. Life is funny. You can't have any honest treatise on life without bumping into some humor.

I've always loved absurdism and plays of that genre. I think that my humour is very much rooted in theatre and drama.

Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

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

Farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.

In comedy, something may be more absurd, but you have to believe just as much as you do when you're doing drama.

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

I've always loved pure, silly slapstick comedy. It always makes me laugh.

If a song is funny and absurd, and it sounds great, it's just going to be that much funnier. And there's no better example of that than 'Monty Python.'

I think comedy, so much of it comes out of the strange sort of golden instant 'cause you don't know why it's funny, but you captured it.

What's fun about comedy is you're pushing things a little further than you would in a drama; you're pushing reality a little bit more.

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

No subject is unsuitable for comedy.

I think actors who take things too far are funny.

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