Ben Folds Quotes

The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.

There is no place for a person like me in a world that only takes itself seriously. Satire is so necessary but fairly ineffective.

The thing about comedy is it gives you a platform to expose your own shortcomings, so it becomes a public display of weirdness.

I'm super happy to say that it's not that hard to write bad stand-up. I guess the trick is to write bad stand-up that sounds like you're trying to be good.

I've spent my entire career being a satirist.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

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

Satire is a form of social control, it's what you do. It's not personal. It's a job.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?

Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.

In 'Malvolio,' the audience laugh at me, and I use that laughter to crack open the question as to why they are laughing.

Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.

I would describe my dancing talents as incredibly deep.

Everything I say is a joke. I am a joke myself.

Eddie Murphy said once in an interview that nothing is offensive if it's funny. I sort of agree with that, but if something's funny and you're the subject of it, sometimes it's more offensive. If someone's insulting you, you want them to sound like an idiot.

I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.

I enjoy taking jobs that make fun of me - or me as Princess Leia, or me as the writer, or whatever, as some idea.

They credited us with the birth of that sort of heavy metal thing. Well, if that's the case, there should be an immediate abortion.

But in terms of satire and comedy, our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine.

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.

I think I've been called edgy - but in all honesty, there is a safety in what I do because I'm always the idiot. Unless you're just listening to buzz words and not taking into account the context of the situation, you see I'm always the ignoramus.

I don't really like using ridicule as a form of humor.

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.

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.

It is difficult not to write satire.