Flannery O'Connor Quotes

I don't really find things funny unless they're deeply tragic at the same time. I think if you're funny just for the sake of being funny, it's just frivolous nonsense. To me, all the best comic plays have been written about really serious and rather bleak things.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy. That's the comedy that I like.

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.

Why do we laugh at such terrible things? Because comedy is often the sarcastic realization of inescapable tragedy.

Dark comedy is very difficult. You have to bring the audience in and push them away at the same time.

From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.

Much of the best humor is found in the frequently tragic reality of human experience.

From my point of view, humour and irony include tragedy; they're two sides of the same coin.

Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it.

It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

For me comedy and violence has a lot in common. Just as you expect, comedy always lurks behind the most unexpected of circumstances.

Any film which views the darker side of life, which is death with a sense of humor, is very much to my taste.

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

'War on Everyone,' I think... the script was hilarious to me, but it's very dark, dark humor. It's super dark.

I prefer comedies when they come from a dark kind of place and have a reality to it.

I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.

All comedy is funny because it tells us truths that we recognise through laughter, but that doesn't mean it can't be unnerving. Think of 'Fawlty Towers'; it can be very, very dark, but by God, it's funny. The two things are not in opposition.

To me, most comedy is dark comedy.

You get annoyed about things in real life, and then the tragic thing is that while you are moaning on the awful injustice and suffering of something, something grimly comic will then strike you about it, like a parasite feeding off the misery of the world.

That's what people forget about, is that when things are very, very powerful in a sad way, they have that possibility of also being over-the-top, hysterically funny.

I love down-and-dirty and grit. But I do think that my favorite dramas are ones that are dark comedies because I think that the only way the audience and the actor can really go as dark and deep as you may want to go is if there's some levity added to it.