Fulke Greville Quotes

The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.

Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.

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.

I think at its best the American sense of humor is the same as the British sense of humor at its best, which is to be wry and ironic and self deprecating.

Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

There's nothing funnier than the human animal.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to make fun of yourself and to do it in a way that sort of preserves your dignity but, at the same time, lets you play the theater of the absurd.

'Man Down' is not a serious study of the human condition: it is a balls-out attempt at making people laugh. So nobody in the show can afford to cling on to any vanity, because we're always going to push the humiliation levels.

We have a need to make people laugh at things they'd never thought about, make them laugh at things that aren't logical.

I draw from the most pompous people, who are the people that make me laugh the most.

Is not parody the eternal lot of man?

Comedy is grievances. It's a recitation of grievances - whether they're inconsequential, superficial - like "my wife shops too much", or "kids today", all those old-fashioned themes - or, if it's deeper, and somewhat more thoughtful, about social imbalance and inequities, and the folly of human behavior. It's usually a complaint.

Everything is funny, if you can laugh at it.

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.

Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.

The role of humour is to make people fall down and writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom of it.

She [Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook.

Knowing comedy is knowing human nature.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

Anything that is not funny at a certain point will be funny.

Our own peculiar human condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.

Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all.