Idries Shah Quotes

The energy in a comedy is very serious. Somebody said comedy is a tragedy plus time. When you have a tragedy, for example, like this, like, 'We're going to die,' and you have time, like, five hours to die, it becomes a comedy.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

In the end, everything is a gag.

Hudibras has defined nonsense, as Cowley does wit, by negatives. Nonsense, he says, is that which is neither true nor false. These two great properties of nonsense, which are always essential to it, give it such a peculiar advantage over all other writings, that it is incapable of being either answered or contradicted.

Chic Murray once told me he fell in the street, and a woman said to him, "Did you fall?" He said, "No, I'm tryin' to break a bar of chocolate in my back pocket."

Just because a subject is serious doesn't mean it doesn't have plenty of absurdities.

Comedy isn't just timing; it's about rooting out the funny in the real. You just bend reality to the left a little.

Comedy is only funny when there's real pain.

There is nothing that is so serious that you can't also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things.

Much of the best humor is found in the frequently tragic reality of human experience.

I've always tended to write comedy, but I'd hate to just write some kind of sitcom or a lighthearted series of jokes and slapstick. I wanted to talk about some deeper things within the comedy.

To deliver something deadpan is very difficult; I don't think people know how hard those jokes are.

I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.

The truth is really funny. It's uncomfortable sometimes, it's dramatic sometimes, but it's really funny. Life is funny.

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.

There's some sort of unspoken license... when outlandish things come out of an inanimate object, somehow it equals humor.

One nice thing about making jokes is that you don't have to prove them.

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

Comedy is a weird thing.

With all comedy, you try to ground it in credibility and reality.

Comedy is funny when it comes from truth, and that's always the rule of them. It's about how far you can push that boundary.

Mike Judge is my Jonathan Swift, and I say that because I don't know any other satirists. But the problem with satire is that it's so easily misinterpreted.

I think all good drama is funny. All the best drama is ultimately very funny. Life is funny. You can't have any honest treatise on life without bumping into some humor.

I don't really like comedy that gives you answers.

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.