Nick Cave Quotes

I think comedy stems from being honest, often painfully so. I hope I can achieve that perspective in my own life and also have fun.

When you take a character seriously, there's more room for comedy because you're not aware of how absurd you are.

You shouldn't get too close to the truth, because then maybe you stop being funny.

I don't just try to be funny.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

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.

The thing about comedy is it gives you a platform to expose your own shortcomings, so it becomes a public display of weirdness.

I'm a funny guy. I want people to laugh. I laugh at myself, I make fun of myself. But at the end of the day everything that I say has a message in it.

You have to be so honest in comedy.

It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.

If I'm in something funny, I like to try and find some kind of serious line in it that people can relate to.

You can be funny and say what you mean; these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Some of the best jokes came from people who meant it. See: Pryor, Bruce, Carlin, etc.

A joke's a very serious thing.

Sometimes the best way to make 'em laugh is to show 'em how you honestly feel.

I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don't really need a distinction between them.

Humor and seriousness are not in opposition to each other.

I think comedy has to come from a real place. It has to come from an honest place.

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not.

I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.

I suppose I look for humor in most situations because it humanizes things; it makes a character much more three-dimensional if there's some kind of humor. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud type of stuff, just a sense that there is a humorous edge to things. I do like that.

I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one.

A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.

I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.

You can pretend to be serious; but you can't pretend to be witty.

I've always littered my songs with jokes. You might need to dig a little deeper to find the humor, but I would totally object to being some kind of distraught personality. I've never tried to attach myself to that.