Julia Davis Quotes

Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.

'Discworld' is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

If you're satirizing something, you're hitting at something that's real and true, and putting it on its head, and we did that with 'Tropic Thunder.'

Being a comedy writer gives you permission to be an outsider and poke fun at what people think about other people.

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.

With Portlandia, I don't think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We're okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.

In a satire, you need foolishness.

I see the absurdity in things, and I think it's my job to point it out.

Very few people took sordid things and made comedies out of them.

If written with enough care and thoughtfulness, a joke can make you laugh at a belief you hold dear.

Louie Anderson thinks my thing is the absurdness of reality. That's what we do on 'Portlandia' all the time. I try to bring that absurdness of reality to everything.

It's a challenge to do satire when the thing you're satirizing is almost beyond satire, but I think that's a challenge for everybody.

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.

There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.

When I'm writing the book I'm laughing at just how overblown the characters seemed. How full of himself he seems. But I didn't get far enough in the series to really drive the joke of it home.

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

I think you can tell the human condition better through comedy.

What's fun about comedy is you're pushing things a little further than you would in a drama; you're pushing reality a little bit more.

A sitcom isn't usually the right tool for satire.

With anything you put out there, you're going to offend somebody, but most people get that it's a joke, that I'm playing a character, and that I'm actually making fun of what I'm saying by saying it.

You can parody almost anything.

Everything can be satirized.

Satire is fascinating stuff. It's deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it's the only thing that makes any sense.

I didn't necessarily set out to think of a show to make fun of reality shows.

I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.