Amy Heckerling Quotes

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

'The Importance of Being Earnest' is important, but it says nothing about anything.

There's a playwright named S.M. Berryman, Sam Berryman, who wrote these kinds of social comedies. They are actually extremely sharp and still quite provocative.

Primarily I'm a social commentator rather than someone who's out to get the belly laugh.

I've spent my entire career being a satirist.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

I think that there's a fine line between comedy and drama.

I love the satire and skewering of comedy writing.

I think jokes can actually go to places that drama can't.

One of the jobs of a stand-up comedienne is to expose hypocrisy.

I think comedy and satire are the strongest ways to deal with very serious themes and very painful themes.

I've always loved absurdism and plays of that genre. I think that my humour is very much rooted in theatre and drama.

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.

It is inconceivable how much wit it requires to avoid being ridiculous.

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.

When I was a playwright earlier in my career - my senior project in high school was my first produced play - I used to put on the title page: 'A tragedy with laughs.'

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

Comedy always pushes some buttons, because it wouldn't be comedy if it didn't.

The Irish and British, they love satire, it's a large part of the culture.

I definitely prefer working in comedy over drama, but at the same time, when it comes to comedy, I tend to prefer comedies that have a great sense of truth to them and that come from an honest place.

I think that comedy is one of the more serious things that you can do in our day, especially in the world that we're living in.

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.

Inappropriate behavior makes me laugh.

I love period dramas and language, but I love comedy as well.