Sam Levinson Quotes

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

Satire is fascinating stuff. It's deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it's the only thing that makes any sense.

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.

Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

Bad times for the Republic are great times for satire.

Effective satire has to be almost identical to the subject that it is skewering.

It's a challenge to do satire when the thing you're satirizing is almost beyond satire, but I think that's a challenge for everybody.

Satire is focused bitterness.

A sitcom isn't usually the right tool for satire.

Social satire has been around since people have been around.

Comedy is a great weapon of attack. It's not a great weapon of support.

Satire is, by definition, offensive. It is meant to make us feel uncomfortable. It is meant to make us scratch our heads, think, do a double-take, and then think again.

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

I think to simply make fun of something isn't particularly interesting. I try to not just do a parody of something or belittle something or disparage something.

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

It is difficult not to write satire.

The show is a satire, which gives us freedom to do anything we want. Satire is the magic word that wipes away any culpability. The media is jealous of this freedom.

I like to write a lot of satire.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.

If you're satirizing something, you're hitting at something that's real and true, and putting it on its head, and we did that with 'Tropic Thunder.'

Satire, whether it be satire or not, everything has to have boundaries.

I think satire is most effective when you love the thing you're satirizing rather than... have a vendetta against it.

Meta-comedy is everywhere and always seems so cold and to me is really kinda snarky.

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.