Lydia Millet Quotes

Like I said, all comedy is based on exaggeration, big or small, whatever you can get away with.

I like a person who knows how to say something dark at a very dark moment. The darker the moment and the darker the comic, the better. Something that is so wrong on all levels.

Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.

'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.

With Portlandia, I don't think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We're okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.

When Kubrick decided to go the black comedy route with his movie, he thought of me to give it that flavor.

Russian humor is to adapt or make some sense or nonsense out of the insanity of their lives.

There are really two types of laughter on the part of the spectator. There is the laughter of recognition - which means seeing things you're familiar with and laughing at yourself. But there's also hysterical laughter - a way of dealing with the things we see that upset us.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

Loser lit antiheroes aren't well intentioned or earnest; they don't care whether you like them or not. They're self-mocking, ironic and inventive; they narrate their downfalls with manic wordplay, rampant metaphors, wisecracks, and escalating flights of spleen-fueled lyricism.

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

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.

Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it.

I think Georges Feydeau said comedy is just tragedy speeded up.

Taking the humour out of Dickens, it's not Dickens any more.

It's always been said that comedy comes mostly out of the dark side anyway.

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

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

I have a very dark sense of humor.

Well what's funny is, again, people say they believed what was going on, but again, Bob's hands are about three times bigger than his feet. So these are very caricatured.

Disappointment is an endless wellspring of comedy inspiration.

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.

A comedian's a comedian. They're a very kind of cynical bunch. I guess that's why I like them.

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

When you take a character seriously, there's more room for comedy because you're not aware of how absurd you are.