Colson Whitehead Quotes

You can parody almost anything.

I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.

Comedy is exaggerated realism. It can be stretched to the almost ludicrous, but it must always be believable.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

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.

You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.

'Discworld' is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

You can't satirise darts, because it's hyper-real as it is; there's already enough over-the-top madness to it.

'W1A' is heightened naturalism, whereas 'The Windsors' is like the fever dream of a 'National Enquirer' reader.

In a satire, you need foolishness.

If a wig is funny when it's two feet tall, why not make it three feet tall? Or ten?

People say the comedy is so shocking, but if you read newspapers or look around generally - I mean, obviously I'm not writing about all the lovely things that there are, which I do see as well - but there is a lot of outrageousness around, slightly covered up. And obviously, it's fun to take that a little bit further.

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.

I love when people overexaggerate. It's so funny to me.

My comedy is a bit cartoonlike, if I really think about it.

Louie Anderson thinks my thing is the absurdness of reality. That's what we do on 'Portlandia' all the time. I try to bring that absurdness of reality to everything.

I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell.

If you have a mother-in-law with only one eye and she has it in the center of her forehead, don't keep her in the living room.

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America, or Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.

The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice--although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.

I like "Rock, Paper, Scissors Two-Thirds." You know. "Rock breaks scissors." "These scissors are bent. They're destroyed. I can't cut stuff. So I lose." "Scissors cuts paper." "These are strips. This is not even paper. It's gonna take me forever to put this back together." "Paper covers rock." "Rock is fine. No structural damage to rock. Rock can break through paper at any point. Just say the word. Paper sucks." There should be "Rock, Dynamite with a Cutable Wick, Scissors."

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.