Alison Bechdel Quotes

But in terms of satire and comedy, our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine.

Status is always ripe for satire, status is always good for comedy.

I got all my politics and culture and my sense of the great wide world of adults from 'Mad Magazine.' But all other comic books literally gave me a headache.

I never really considered 'Quantum & Woody' a comedic book or a funny book. I never thought of it as a satire.

You start out with Mad magazine, and you go right through the sort of black humor of Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Mort Sahl, Paul Krassner... If you put Lenny together with Mad magazine and run it through the brain of a college student, you get National Lampoon.

Well I've made no secret of my life long love of MAD Magazine, it's probably my first and greatest influence in terms of my comic sensibilities. I've known John [Ficarra] for many years, and we've been friends. About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea.

There are parodies of non-existent things.

I love comic books, comic book characters and superheroes.

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.

That is Obama's signature move: Invent people who are saying ridiculous things and then encourage the audience to laugh at these made-up buffoons.

I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind. I don't like that style whereby you kind of stitch people up. But the deeper thing is that I just find these people so impressive and admirable.

For the reader who has put away comic books, but isn't yet ready for editorials in the Daily News.

When I was a kid, I used to be way more nerdy about comic books and comic book characters. I still love them, but I don't collect anymore.

As a comedian I appreciate every kind of comedy. You decide for yourself what you're going to do.

I'm a comic geek, I love playing video games and I love reading comics.

I see parody as another form of comedy. If you are making a comedy, there are a lot of different ways to do it. I'm not necessarily always aware of my quote-unquote persona when doing things like that. It's more, "What does the character need at the time?" I'm certainly drawn to certain types of material, there's no doubt about that.

Growing up, I didn't have any comic books, at all. But my friend had a trunk full of them, so comic books were like candy for me. I would go over to his house for a sleep-over, and I would just be devouring everything I could get my hands on. I knew the sleep-over was going to be over, and I was going to go back to my house and it was going to be Kipling.

I love comedy. I don't approach it any different. I'm not a comedian. I'm not a stand-up. I just do it like a part and personally, I love to watch comedies. If you don't get to do what you like to watch you get frustrated.

Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.

That's part of the comedy, too, is we do have jokes throughout of hanging a lantern on the absurdity of the world. Like, when BoJack's flying over the neighborhood, you see some houses have swimming pools in the backyard, and what does that mean? Why would there be a swimming pool underwater? But we thought it was funny.

Then Saturday Night Live spawns... well, everything right down to American Pie 9, where all humor has to be irrelevant, which can get a little tiring.

I think I'm equally as abusive as the editors normally are for the "Letters and Tomatoes" column, which is the fan mail part of MAD Magazine and an ongoing feature.

Good comedy makes you laugh, and bad comedy makes people you hate laugh.

Stand-up was interesting to me at the beginning, because I was trying to parody it. My early stand-up was really Andy Kaufman-esque, and then I became the very thing I was making fun of.

My joke about Aaron Sorkin is that The West Wing was a great show about democracy, run by Kim Jong-Il!