Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it.

There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.

When I was a playwright earlier in my career - my senior project in high school was my first produced play - I used to put on the title page: 'A tragedy with laughs.'

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

I naturally think in terms of comedy whenever I see anything because tragedy is so close to comedy, so I like to add the tragedy to the comedy or a little bit of comedy to the tragedy in order to make them both feel more real to me.

I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy.

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

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

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

Believe it or not, there's a lot of humor in 'Mad Men.' Especially in the dark moments.

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

I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.

I think all good drama is funny. All the best drama is ultimately very funny. Life is funny. You can't have any honest treatise on life without bumping into some humor.

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.

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.

I think Georges Feydeau said comedy is just tragedy speeded up.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

In comedy, something may be more absurd, but you have to believe just as much as you do when you're doing drama.

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.

It's great extremes which leads to great drama and great comedy.

Sometimes in the most tragic situation, something just profoundly funny happens.

I like a person who knows how to say something dark at a very dark moment. The darker the moment and the darker the comic, the better. Something that is so wrong on all levels.

I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.

Comedy arises out of necessity, because some things are so dark that you have to laugh about it.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy. That's the comedy that I like.