I. F. Stone Quotes

There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.

Caricature is rough truth.

If you're satirizing something, you're hitting at something that's real and true, and putting it on its head, and we did that with 'Tropic Thunder.'

Effective satire has to be almost identical to the subject that it is skewering.

Satire makes people learn something more than being lectured.

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

For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile--and without a blush--in steadfast virile seriousness.

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

Conventional show-biz savvy held that Americans hated to be the objects of satire.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

A sitcom isn't usually the right tool for satire.

Satire of satire tends to be self-canceling, and deliberate shock tactics soon lose their ability to shock, especially when they're too deliberate.

The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!

I didn't necessarily set out to think of a show to make fun of reality shows.

I think comedians have a function in society, which is to make fun of our icons.

I eventually saw the satirical nature of caricaturing individuals.

Humor is the truth; wit is an exaggeration of the truth.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.

A lot of people tend to glorify the role of satire and comedians. They put them up as role models, as fighters for the truth and against tyranny, and I think that's overrated.

If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.

The trouble with most comedians who try to do satire is that they are essentially brash, noisy and indelicate people who have to use a sledge hammer to smash a butterfly.

Comedians in general make their living calling liars on their lies.

The best cartoons work by making fun of sacred cows, in trying to inflict the uncomfortable.

An 'insult comic' is the title I was given. What I do is exaggeration. I make fun of people, at life, of myself and my surroundings.