Mary McCarthy Quotes

There's nothing funnier than the human animal.

Comedy is grievances. It's a recitation of grievances - whether they're inconsequential, superficial - like "my wife shops too much", or "kids today", all those old-fashioned themes - or, if it's deeper, and somewhat more thoughtful, about social imbalance and inequities, and the folly of human behavior. It's usually a complaint.

In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.

Sex is pretty funny, let's face it. And the more seriously we take ourselves, the funnier sex gets, I think.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

A lot of comedies are based on the reaction shot. You have one person doing something stupid and one person is generally the straight man, and the laughs generally come on the reaction of the straight man to the funny thing the other person has done.

I've always loved pure, silly slapstick comedy. It always makes me laugh.

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

I laugh at absurdity hardest, then stories, then observations, then bearded men on roller skates.

I don't believe that anybody has come to a conclusion on why something is funny. It's funny because it's ridiculous and it's ridiculous for different reasons at different times.

Funny is as funny does, and funny puts on a walrus mask and slowly gyrates in a mall food court. I laugh at absurdity hardest, then stories, then observations, then bearded men on roller skates.

Comedy arises out of necessity, because some things are so dark that you have to laugh about it.

I like really stupid comedies.

Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.

As you know it is a comedy so everything is a little bit pushed. That's what's funny about this kind of movie is you can laugh about the absurdity, and the bad side of life.

Every milieu has something ridiculous about it - film-making, the music world, painting - because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly.

I happen to think singing is hilarious, especially when it pops out at the wrong time.

I am drawn to humorous art that is ironic.

We're taking part in a divine comedy and we should realise that the play is always a comedy, in that we're all ultimately ridiculous.

I like idiotic comedies.

Madness isn't altogether a bad thing in comedy.

Life itself is pretty funny when you realize how absurd it can be.

I put the storyboard down and came back to it like two weeks later and saw that I had written 'Butt-Head' next to the picture, and it kind of made me laugh and I thought, Well, might as well go for every laugh you can get.

Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.