Mort Sahl Quotes

I've done pretty well as a professional fed-up. The tools of my trade so far have been irony, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and supercilious contempt, but these are highly civilized weapons designed for 18th-century French salons.

I use humour a lot. My foundation is tragic, but my appearance is humorous.

I'm known as a kind of dramatic, serious, almost humorless actor and the fact is, I'm a funny guy, and I spend most of my life trying to find a lighter side of things, and on stage was given plenty of opportunity to do that.

I'm not a particularly shiny, happy person. I'm fairly cynical, and that's what draws me to comedy.

Everybody's funny in different ways.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

I think I'm funnier in my writing than in person.

I'm a silly guy, I love wit and cynicism and sarcasm.

I don't think it's ever easy to be funny. I find it easy to amuse myself with a certain sort of cynical dark humor that tends toward the meaner side, like my character in Happy Gilmore. Those kinds of characters come easily to me.

Humor comes from self-confidence.

Comedies always need to be provocative and catch your attention in a way that dramas don't have to.

I have some sarcastic sides of me.

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

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

I like funny things, but I don't find myself particularly funny.

I have a very dark sense of humor.

Disappointment is an endless wellspring of comedy inspiration.

I like to think my sense of humor is sort of smart and dumb at the same time. I like to work on multiple levels - smart and dumb, funny and sad, profound and mundane, cynical and hopeful.

I'm not very funny!

There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature.

For some reason, people find me funny. It's quite hard to define why a thought is funny. It's even harder to define why a person would be funny. It's a word that I can't define at all. But whether I know quite what it is or not, I seem to be it.

Satire is focused bitterness.

For me, humor is everything!

I suppose I look for humor in most situations because it humanizes things; it makes a character much more three-dimensional if there's some kind of humor. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud type of stuff, just a sense that there is a humorous edge to things. I do like that.

You shouldn't get too close to the truth, because then maybe you stop being funny.