Dorothy Parker Quotes

Comedy should be easy, not laboured.

There's no such thing as a cheap laugh.

Comedy is just honesty. Whether things are going well or bad.

I'm a big fan of saying the thing that is not necessarily sincere or earnest, but definitely honest.

I'm tongue in cheek, but very much to the point.

Fake buckteeth make a joke that you don't have to make any effort on, even if you're not a funny person.

You feel like telling him you're not single in the way that he thinks you're single. After all, you have yourself. I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.

We told Stanley Roberts to go on a water diet, and Lake Superior disappeared.

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.

Faith can move mountains but let them happily fall down on the heads of other people. What's the point in moving mountains when it's so simple to climb over them?

I saw a lady on TV, she was born without arms. That's sad, but then they said, "Lola does not know the meaning of the word 'can't'." That, to me, is even worse in a way. Not only is she missing arms, but she doesn't understand simple contractions. It's easy, Lola - you just take two words, put them together, take out the middle letters, put in a comma, and you raise it up!

Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.

The other day I started to take a course in psycho-ceramics. What is psycho-ceramics? It's the study of crackpots.

It is commonly said that ridicule is the best test of truth; for that it will not stick where it is not just. I deny it. A truth learned in a certain light, and attacked in certain words, by men of wit and humor, may, and often doth, become ridiculous, at least so far, that the truth is only remembered and repeated for the sake of the ridicule.

Irony ruined everything Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be 'so bad they were good'. They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody's in on the joke now. Everybody's hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.

People have a sense of humor, even if it's not a good one, and everybody has stakes.

You're sitting there, with your wife and your baby and your smiling dog, and you're watching Real Housewives getting into fistfights on TV. And you go, 'How great is my life? I'm so happy right now.'

Excuse me? You're a lady?" "I bought a title on the Internet. I own one square inch of Scotland. And you're changing the subject.

You should tell the truth as often as you can, but in such a way as people don't believe you or think that you're being funny.

our friendship has no other purpose, no other reason, than to show you how utterly unlike me you are.

In God We Trust. It is the choicest compliment that has ever been paid us, and the most gratifying to our feelings. It is simple, direct, gracefully phrased; it always sounds well - In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true.

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

The Bible is the funniest book I have ever read. It's so funny! Right in the first six pages, it's funny!

So about 80 years after the Constitution is ratified, the slaves are freed. Not so you'd really notice it of course; just kinda on paper. And that of course was at the end of the Civil War. Now there is another phrase I dearly love. That is a true oxymoron if I've ever heard one: "Civil War." Do you think anybody in this country could ever really have a civil war? "Say, pardon me?" (shoots gun) "I'm awfully sorry. Awfully sorry."

I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter and I'm sort of reporting.