Graydon Carter Quotes

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.

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

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.'

Effective satire has to be almost identical to the subject that it is skewering.

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

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

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.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.

It is difficult not to write satire.

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

Satire, whether it be satire or not, everything has to have boundaries.

I think satire is most effective when you love the thing you're satirizing rather than... have a vendetta against it.

Mike Judge is my Jonathan Swift, and I say that because I don't know any other satirists. But the problem with satire is that it's so easily misinterpreted.

In a satire, you need foolishness.

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

If you look at 'Network' or any kind of satire, it's fundamentally unemotional in some ways.

People say the comedy is so shocking, but if you read newspapers or look around generally - I mean, obviously I'm not writing about all the lovely things that there are, which I do see as well - but there is a lot of outrageousness around, slightly covered up. And obviously, it's fun to take that a little bit further.

Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.

Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.

Social satire has been around since people have been around.

Everything can be satirized.

Comedy is a great weapon of attack. It's not a great weapon of support.

Satire is, by definition, offensive. It is meant to make us feel uncomfortable. It is meant to make us scratch our heads, think, do a double-take, and then think again.

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