Merrill Markoe Quotes

I tend to think that there is a sophistication to everything at 'Saturday Night Live,' including the sketches.

If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.

I always tell people I went to the Harvard School of Comedy in front of America.

My whole life I try to make into a comedy, so it would be nice to see that onscreen.

My sense of humor is a turkey, and I pull it out of the oven and baste it in reality.

I think great humor lies in playing the truth of a situation.

It's very weird trying to imagine yourself as a 'comedy character.'

I'm a 'Saturday Night Live' guy. I'm a comedy guy. As long as they're giving it to everyone, I don't care about how low they go, most of the time.

When you're laughing aloud at David Sedaris' every sentence, it's easy to miss the more serious side of what he's up to.

Most humor comes from truth. In the end, if I can laugh about it, who cares?

Nothing's true that I say, because I don't really want to say anything. I don't think my life's that cool, and I don't think my opinion's that valid. They're just silly jokes. Usually I just take a topic that isn't funny at all, like Shakespeare, and work backwards. I just try to find an unfunny subject.

It really is great. Especially having people who we make fun every week come on and poke fun at themselves is really cool, I love that. No reality star has been mad at me yet for making fun of them. I'm sure that one day soon though, someone is going to take a swing at me.

Louie Anderson thinks my thing is the absurdness of reality. That's what we do on 'Portlandia' all the time. I try to bring that absurdness of reality to everything.

The whole point of real comedy is that you can say something that is true, and by being funny, you can make it tolerable for people, and hopefully they'll laugh at you, too.

The bulk of my work is comedy and I wanted to use the gaming world as a vehicle to deliver comedy.

I want people to watch us and think, 'They're idiots. They're clowns,' I want them to watch us and think Tommy Cooper or Spike Milligan.

To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx.

Reading Alan Zweibel makes me laugh out loud. And yet it is not a particularly funny name.

The Fomorians skittered backward, away from me, looking justifiably confused. I mean, really, how many human women actually run to them? And I was a human woman covered in swamp yuck, with wild red hair sticking out in matted hunks and arms flailing like a demented Bride of Frankenstein. I'd run from me.

Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.

Some people even think I wear a wig. Do they think I went into a salon one day and said, Can you please screw this up really bad?

I think comedy in the last 5-7 years is as good as it's ever been in America. I like it when people push it. You go through periods where people did not push the envelope. The more you push it, the funnier you get.

I think it's hilarious when middle-aged white men try to take themselves seriously. It makes me laugh.

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

I swear, sometimes I am convinced my life is just a series of sketches for America's Funniest Home Videos, minus all that pants-dropping business. Except my life really isn't all that funny if you think about it.