Mark Russell Quotes

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

Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.

Social satire has been around since people have been around.

If you write satire, the guilty pleasure these days is that there's just so much material about. On the other hand, if you have a family it can be depressing.

It is difficult not to write satire.

I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early '70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire.

Sometimes people say I'm a political comedian, which, actually I'm not. I'm a comedian who sometimes discusses politics, culture - again, the word 'politics' to me is just life.

I like to write a lot of satire.

I've always thought George Carlin was brilliant.

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

I grew up in a bit of a vacuum. And as a kid, you see 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' and you're like, 'Oh, it's a cartoon.' There's mixed media. It's funny, and there's stop-motion. But as an adult, you figure it out, how the entire underpinnings of their comedy was poking fun at the rank and file of the British aristocracy and the monarchy.

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.

Comedy can be destructive, and still very, very funny. But if I can do something that is fun to watch and critical of the world but not wantonly destructive, I pursue those kinds of ideas more. The world needs less destruction. And destruction is kind of “easy,” too.

I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually care about, and that's really it. I have great respect for people who are in the front lines and the trenches of trying to enact social change, but I am far lazier than that.

Satire that is seasonable and just is often more effectual than law or gospel.

I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually care about.

My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses.

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

Good satire hopefully provides thought-provoking conversation.

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.

In the present state of the world it is difficult not to write lampoons.

Good comedians are great philosophers.