Hari Kondabolu Quotes

I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy.

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.

Mixed feelings, like mixed drinks, are a confusion to the soul.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

The best way to make the most serious point in the world is to be as unserious as possible.

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.

In the best farce today we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move logically enough to the ending.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

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

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

Although humor is present in every one of my films, it has always been used as a way to make the darker, heavier stuff in my stories more palatable. I never set out to make 'Humpday' a comedy.

When I'm playing comedy, I never do 'jokes.' Sometimes I'll deliver a line in a way I think is more likely to get a laugh, but all the best comedy is played straight. What's funny is the way it hits the world around it or the way it hits the other characters.

I think at its best the American sense of humor is the same as the British sense of humor at its best, which is to be wry and ironic and self deprecating.

Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.

For me comedy and violence has a lot in common. Just as you expect, comedy always lurks behind the most unexpected of circumstances.

Look at 'Batman' - that was theater of the absurd, as is 'Family Guy.'

Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn't present it as evil but a collection of banalities.

The logical quandaries thrown up by well-meaning systems are clearly something that I find darkly amusing.

From my point of view, humour and irony include tragedy; they're two sides of the same coin.

I find heartbreaking stuff really funny.

Science would like to tell us that people laugh because of the benign violation theory, but comedy doesn't have hard rules.

Any tragic memory I have I also think is really funny. On any given day, I can think about how horrible something is and also how ridiculous and over-the-top it is.

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?'

I've got a sick sense of humour, a dark sense of humour. I do care about things and care about people but there's another side to me.

I love taking something that is understood to be funny or charming or sweet or naive and instilling it with some degree of gravity.