Phyllis Diller Quotes

Occasionally I like to have facials but I do think they rub too much stuff on your face. I don't really like having my hair and makeup done because it's a work thing.

When I go to the beauty parlor, I always use the emergency entrance. Sometimes I just go for an estimate.

I was born serious and I have earned my bread making other people laugh.

To take my work seriously would be the height of folly.

I'm a real paradox. Because I'm a very serious person, and I take my work very seriously. But I wrap it up in a court jester and a clown and make people laugh and make them feel good about themselves.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

Laurence Olivier said in an interview once that when he plays a tragedy he always aims for the funny parts, and the other way around. Because in a comedy you look for what's serious. I think that's true. Sometimes things are really funny if you're absolutely earnest. If you're really serious, it's hilarious.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

In everything I write, I'm always striving to hit the right mix of light and darkness, humor and pain, fun and seriousness.

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

My whole life is classical now. Except my wife. I don't have a classical wife. I have a classy wife, but I don't have a classical wife.

I'm a very serious person. Unfortunately, sometimes.

Just because a subject is serious doesn't mean it doesn't have plenty of absurdities.

There is nothing that is so serious that you can't also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things.

Generally speaking, cancer - not that funny of a thing. When you hear about it, you don't go, 'Oh, hilarious!'... But within that - comedy, tragedy, hand-in-hand.

Some things are so tragic that you don't know what's funny in it, and some things are so ridiculous you don't know if it's worth talking about it.

On one level, I am a massive joker and can't take anything seriously, but on the other hand, I'm incredibly serious and a deep thinker, so I have that dichotomy within me.

I'm inspired by making people laugh at subjects that should make them cry.

People are complex, and I think it's a huge element of what I do, because you have to balance out the fact that you talk about quite serious things with a sense of irony and tongue-in-cheek humor. That's my personality as well.

I love watching people be totally committed in a very real way to stupid situations. I find it's not so much trying to be funny, it's trying to be real in a messed up context. That's comedy to me.

I spent seven hours in a beauty shop... and that was for the estimate.

Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.

I feel like with comedy, the crazy things that happen are never serious you know? Like, rubble being poured onto you in drama would be something that's absolutely terrible, but in a comedy it's absolutely terrible but so funny.

It was a bit of fun. But of course like anything that starts as a joke, people started to take it all seriously!

People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough.