Kate Clinton Quotes

Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

I'm a terrible punster. And I love to rhyme. I just can't help myself.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

In order to be able to write a good joke, you have to find the truth.

I don't write punch lines.

In comedy, it's so subjective; there is no right or wrong.

The most important thing in comedy - apart from empathy, which I think is important even if disguised - is surprise. I like surprising people with the fact that something's even a joke at all.

With comedians, you have that understanding that we're trying to get laughs.

George Carlin is brilliant with words, and Johnny Winters is very creative. It's taking something common and drawing out the humor, being clever with words.

Only the pun remains. The pun, beloved of Shakespeare, children and tabloid headline-writers, is normally eschewed in the modern, sophisticated circles in which I move.

Puns are a form of humor with words.

Comedy is such a personal thing. Everybody can cry at the same thing, but it's a lot harder to get everyone to laugh at the same thing.

I love physical comedy. I love Oscar Wilde, I love Shakespeare comedies, I love improv.

I became a specialist at comedic one-liners.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

I'm probably doing puns more than anything in my life.

I think the humor of double puns is incredible.

The funniest line in English is 'Get it?' When you say that, everyone chortles.

Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it, or you don't. You can't attain it.

Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn't funny. It's a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it's not a surprise anymore.

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

You can't teach someone to be funny, but you can teach comic timing. If you listen to a good comic, you can learn how to put it on a page.

I get just as much of a thrill out of constructing a good sentence that gets a laugh at the end as I do from a joke.