Terry Pratchett Quotes

Optimism isn't funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. It's exaggeration.

What's fun about comedy is you're pushing things a little further than you would in a drama; you're pushing reality a little bit more.

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

You can parody almost anything.

Everything can be satirized.

Comedy is unusual people in real situations; farce is real people in unusual situations.

Like I said, all comedy is based on exaggeration, big or small, whatever you can get away with.

One day there were two out in the ninth, and I hit a pop fly so high that the fans got tired of waiting for it to come down. So they all went home and listened to it drop by turning on the radio.

As you know it is a comedy so everything is a little bit pushed. That's what's funny about this kind of movie is you can laugh about the absurdity, and the bad side of life.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

With Portlandia, I don't think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We're okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.

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

Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.

More eccentric characters can push pretty far, but if you stay on the side of reality, it's always funnier.

'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.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.

It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The Rock was one of my favourite comedy characters growing up, and I still think he is. Mainly because he took himself so seriously by being ridiculous and a buffoon all the time but always took the high status.

In a satire, you need foolishness.

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.

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

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.

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

In comedy, falling means laughter. You can take something sacred and make it silly. The more sacred it is, the funnier it is. It has a bigger drop to fall.