Todd Solondz Quotes

The trick of 'Up' was to balance the sad stuff with the silly stuff.

I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

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

All people are sad clowns. That's the key to comedy - and it's a buffer against reality.

I think of everything as comedy, but I don't think of it in terms of sitcom comedy, I think of it in terms of Chekhov comedy. Chekhov called his plays comedies. There's always a mixture of a laugh with sadness. So the plie to the laugh is sadness.

I find Spike Jones' movies to be really very inventive and funny, but they're really sad and touching and really key into the different facets of the human experience.

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

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.

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 always felt like the best comedy came out of sadness, and some of my favourite shows growing up - a lot of my influences - have these very sad characters and treat that sadness seriously while also being very funny.

Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it.

I naturally think in terms of comedy whenever I see anything because tragedy is so close to comedy, so I like to add the tragedy to the comedy or a little bit of comedy to the tragedy in order to make them both feel more real to me.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.

All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.

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

There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.

Sometimes in the most tragic situation, something just profoundly funny happens.

You can't be funny unless you're tragic, and you can't be tragic unless you're funny.

When I was a playwright earlier in my career - my senior project in high school was my first produced play - I used to put on the title page: 'A tragedy with laughs.'

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

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

There's a rule of writing: if everything is funny, nothing is funny; if everything is sad, nothing is sad. You want that contrast.

Funny and sad are two sides of the same coin. I think that most comedians are able to tap into deep subject matter.