Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

It's a pragmatist's business, comedy. Start off with good intentions and references to the Pompidou Centre and you end up with boiled sweets and a pantomime cow.

I don't take myself or the species too seriously. You have to laugh at everything.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that… Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.

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

The whole point of real comedy is that you can say something that is true, and by being funny, you can make it tolerable for people, and hopefully they'll laugh at you, too.

Most humor comes from truth. In the end, if I can laugh about it, who cares?

'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.

I love dealing with drama. I'm drawn to the painful side of storytelling, more so. I feel like that's where you get the most honesty from. My laughter comes from irony. You laugh at my pain. I can't look for the laugh 'cause I'll fall flat on my face. I like the type of laughter that comes from irony like, "Of course, it's sunny today when I wore a mink coat!" I'm that guy. I was raised on Benny Hill and The Odd Couple and The Honeymooners.

Comedy is hostile to profundity, and brings everything to the surface.

Reading Alan Zweibel makes me laugh out loud. And yet it is not a particularly funny name.

Comedy is tragedy revisited or hostility. It is mock hostility, of course, or it would be ugly; we would have a war.

Sometimes WRONG is worth the FUNNY!

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.

The ridiculous is produced by any defect that is unattended by pain, or fatal consequences; thus, an ugly and deformed countenance does not fail to cause laughter, if it is not occasioned by pain.

Comedy is tragedy revisited.

But the main thing I don't want to be is un-funny. That's really the mandate. Just whatever we're doing, make it as funny as we can possibly make it. And believe me, if the show starts going down, we'll introduce a baby. We'll do everything that they did on 'Family Ties.' I'm not afraid of that.

Everything is funny, if you can laugh at it.

Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not also the only one that deserves to be laughed at?

Comedy exists to laugh at things that aren't laughable. But isn't it? That's what separates us from the animals. We laugh.

Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.

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.

Laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory.

I don't really tell a joke, I react to situations. The whole thing is just looking at somebody and showing all our weaknesses and exaggerating them, and that's how it becomes funny.

The Jackass movies are honestly some of the best movies I've ever seen. I laugh so hard at them. Those guys are geniuses. If they had grown up with a different group of people, they could've been performance artists at Bard College, and people would be writing papers about them.

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