Dakin Matthews Quotes

Englishmen have always loved Moliere.

A lot of French comedy is satire.

It's true that none of my characters are admirable. But maybe I'm primarily a satirist, and a satirist needs to hold up what's not admirable.

Satire is a composition of salt and mercury; and it depends upon the different mixture and preparation of those ingredients, that it comes out a noble medicine, or a rank poison.

It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.

In a satire, you need foolishness.

I've always loved absurdism and plays of that genre. I think that my humour is very much rooted in theatre and drama.

Comedy, surprisingly for a form that intends to bring joy and joviality, is always upsetting people. Jokes rely on broad strokes, stereotypes, caricatures, exaggerations and simplifications.

I've made a lot of crazy comedy videos and said a lot of crazy things. If it's too offensive, I apologize and move on, but I do comedy.

I'm a huge fan of French comedy. The French play comedy in a slightly different way than we do: they play it with a sort of realism that we don't necessarily often do ourselves.

Comedy actually works best when you're living in an OK world, and you are pointing out the hypocrisy in apathy.

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.

Many people mistakenly think of farce as broad low comedy. In fact, it's polished high comedy.

Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

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.

The whole character of Super Dave is a takeoff on people who pontificate. So one thing I never want to do is pontificate why this works, why this is funny. I have no idea what the appeal is. All we are trying to do is make people have a good time and laugh.

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.

That's what I love about 'MADtv': If you exist, if you breathe, we will take you down.

'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.

The common thread of my comedy shows is conflict and, I guess, the frustration of people who either argue with you or just say stuff which is blatantly incorrect, and nobody calls them out on it.

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

The most serious parody I have ever heard was this: In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.

Is not parody the eternal lot of man?

Satire recoils whenever charged too high; round your own fame the fatal splinters fly.

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.