Shel Silverstein Quotes

My dad's sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal - his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.

You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.

I went into a French restaraunt and asked the waiter, 'Have you got frog's legs?' He said, 'Yes,' so I said, 'Well hop into the kitchen and get me a cheese sandwich.'

I said to the waitress, "There's a fly swimming in my soup." She said: "You've got too much soup - he should only be able to paddle."

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

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.

So I got home, and the phone was ringing. I picked it up, and said 'Who's speaking please?' And a voice said 'You are.'

I went into a McDonald's yesterday and said, 'I'd like some fries.' The girl at the counter said, 'Would you like some fries with that?'

I've heard too many times where people say that I'm this ultra-serious guy. In truth, I've got an extremely absurd sense of humor. I thrive on the absurd - I love it.

A lot of what I do - I have to try and make sense of things before I can make nonsense of them.

The pun exists in a social and political void, caring nothing for the issues of its day, content merely to display itself in its small cleverness.

Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.

I bought some instant water one time but I didn't know what to add to it.

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

The first thing I ever got my hands on was Andy Griffith's 'What It Was, Was Football.' I was fascinated with the fact that every syllable made it funny, and I would laugh even though I didn't know what any of it meant.

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

I find something funny when it lives on many levels - a level of self-deprecation, of knowledge and heightened reality.

I'm not funny ha-ha, but I look for real humour in just about everything I've ever played.

Absurdity is my favorite brand of humor because deep down inside, in our subconscious, it's all surrealism. It's all abstract. The world is the surrealism, the absurdity, the humor - it all just overlaps.

People can see that we are part of a tradition of absurd comedy, stretching from Spike Milligan and Peter Cook through to Monty Python and Vic Reeves. We're not like Ricky Gervais's hyper-real cringe comedy. We're at the other end of the scale, but there's room for the sillier stuff, too.

When I'm writing a lyric, things can only get so serious before they start becoming humorous.

There are thousands of ways to make people laugh - satire, black comedy, slapstick.

Woody Allen's 'The Complete Prose' - It's just the best selection of comic writing by one author. You know it's good comedy when you get quite demoralised about yourself.

I love comedy. I love the absurdity of it. I love the kind of intelligence that's required to be dumb in comedy.

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