James L. Brooks Quotes

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

I think the best comedy is tragicomic. Yeah, I suppose if you were to look at everything I've done, there is a bit of a black streak through all of it. It's not deliberate: it's what makes me laugh, and there's a fine tradition of it, especially in Ireland.

I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy.

I don't really find things funny unless they're deeply tragic at the same time. I think if you're funny just for the sake of being funny, it's just frivolous nonsense. To me, all the best comic plays have been written about really serious and rather bleak things.

I think you figure out how to be funny by necessity. It's not a natural thing, being funny in the face of tragedy is kind of demented.

I'd have to say that my favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning. 'Little Miss Sunshine' is like that. That's my fave genre, if I had to pick one.

I would say most comedians have a very cynical worldview of the way the world can work. It's almost like if you didn't, you couldn't be a comedian.

Although humor is present in every one of my films, it has always been used as a way to make the darker, heavier stuff in my stories more palatable. I never set out to make 'Humpday' a comedy.

I read somewhere that when I go on stage, people realize that they're not me and they feel better. When I walk off the stage, people know who I really am. I'm not saying it's great comedy, cool comedy or better comedy - but that's what I do, and I do it first for myself.

In my standup work, I always do these characters, older people who are just off to the side. It's easier to write a story about the guy who made it to the top, but the middle is so much more interesting, so much more murky.

My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.

Why do we laugh at such terrible things? Because comedy is often the sarcastic realization of inescapable tragedy.

At the end of the day I'm writing comedy. If you get too realistic as a comedy writer with your disasters, it stops being funny.

I'm a huge, huge fan of Chris Morris. I think he's a genius, and it is not a word I use very often. I think he's fantastic.

Unfortunately, I was making comedies in my 20s, but other people didn't realize they were comedies.

All comedy is funny because it tells us truths that we recognise through laughter, but that doesn't mean it can't be unnerving. Think of 'Fawlty Towers'; it can be very, very dark, but by God, it's funny. The two things are not in opposition.

I love down-and-dirty and grit. But I do think that my favorite dramas are ones that are dark comedies because I think that the only way the audience and the actor can really go as dark and deep as you may want to go is if there's some levity added to it.

Since 'The Office,' everyone has this idea that comedy is only good if it reflects the way people really speak. But that's nonsense - and it's a problem unique to comedy.

I always felt like the best comedy came out of sadness, and some of my favourite shows growing up - a lot of my influences - have these very sad characters and treat that sadness seriously while also being very funny.

I can find the worst thing in the world funny. My humour is dark. If I'm talking about the worst situations in my life, it's like a comedy - you can laugh at my pain.

Real comedy can't be learned; it comes from a need for justice. The best who stand up, stand up for something.

I like films that are so funny, dramatic and lifelike simultaneously, that you are laughing and cringing simultaneously all throughout the film.

But our comedies never endured long without a tragedy.

[Simone Weil's] life is almost a perfect blend of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny.

I think that you can make a drama and have it be intensely funny, and vice versa.