James Bobin Quotes

'The Importance of Being Earnest' is important, but it says nothing about anything.

A sitcom isn't usually the right tool for satire.

I don't want to offend people and I don't want to be mean, but social commentary and comedy for me are part and parcel. I think the greatest social activists are comedians.

Primarily I'm a social commentator rather than someone who's out to get the belly laugh.

I've spent my entire career being a satirist.

I've always been interested in socially political, or overtly political, comedy.

The pun exists in a social and political void, caring nothing for the issues of its day, content merely to display itself in its small cleverness.

I've always thought George Carlin was brilliant.

Monty Python never directly said, 'We're liberals' - they just did their sketches, and you had to figure it out. Generally, they were anti-establishment, of course, making fun of the people in power. I think, comedians, that's their job - pointing out what other people might not notice and going, 'Yoo-hoo, over here.'

I see the absurdity in things, and I think it's my job to point it out.

Comedy actually works best when you're living in an OK world, and you are pointing out the hypocrisy in apathy.

Comedians play off of social commentary.

Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

'The Dictator' - well, that was just a comedy, and I suppose the morality was incidental. It was just something to try and make people laugh rather than being a serious thing.

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.

I think comedy's often the little and the large, isn't it?

I write what I think is funny and I write from a sense of popping a balloon or a sense of injustice, whether it's about yourself, or whether it's about something else. It's my worldview; it doesn't mean that everybody has to agree with it.

It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius.

Who is Mike Judge? Let me think. The only way I could possibly answer that question would be in a nonverbal fashion. I think I could do an interpretive dance that would answer that question for you.

I wanted to do something in the style of a comedy of manners.

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

I think you can tell the human condition better through comedy.

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

Eighty per cent of my output is 'Mallory clowns on the Western canon,' and I'm happy to be that person.

I was heavily influenced by Andy Kaufman and Steven Wright.