Maysoon Zayid Quotes

Comedies always need to be provocative and catch your attention in a way that dramas don't have to.

I write what I think is funny and I write from a sense of popping a balloon or a sense of injustice, whether it's about yourself, or whether it's about something else. It's my worldview; it doesn't mean that everybody has to agree with it.

If I'm in something funny, I like to try and find some kind of serious line in it that people can relate to.

I've always enjoyed making people laugh. But in order for me to be funny, I have to get ticked off about something.

I think comedy, so much of it comes out of the strange sort of golden instant 'cause you don't know why it's funny, but you captured it.

To do something funny, you have to have experienced it in real life and digested it in a way that amuses you.

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.

I always had a tremendous amount of rage about the business, and I thought turning that into comedy was healthy.

People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

Impropriety is the soul of wit.

It's interesting to take a look at people who deal with prejudice on a daily basis - it's been a real eye opener for me.

I never write anything without humor, just because I like humor, but at the same time, it is a way for anything fantastical to become relatable.

Being an outsider helps breed comedy.

I admire my boss, Lorne Michaels. He never stops producing. I think, for him, comedy is a tool of compassion, a way of rallying people together and saying, 'Guys, isn't the world bonkers? Aren't we all just trying our best?' There's a tenderness in everything he does.

I think I write serious comedies. I would love to be able to write for pure pleasure, but the undertow is always loneliness.

If we do not know what humor is, that may be because we do not know what humankind is.

The underlying goal of comedy is feeling not-alone.

I'll see something, and I'll go, 'Oh, wow, that's interesting,' because really, comedy comes from the truth.

If I can relate to the joke, it's going to be funny.

When doing comedy, I do what makes me laugh. The first person I learned from said I should talk about things I am passionate about - that I love or hate - because the audience likes to see passion. The stuff I rant and rave about stems from a place that really pisses me off.

Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.

I think ultimately, when you believe somebody is going through a situation and it's either awkward or ridiculous, but you believe it, that can be funny.

The most important thing in comedy - apart from empathy, which I think is important even if disguised - is surprise. I like surprising people with the fact that something's even a joke at all.

I think you need to be able to see a lot of negative in things in order to extract material, so there's probably something to that. A lot of the people I used to work with were very, very, very unfunny offstage, so that's a pretty common thing.