Ryan North Quotes

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

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.

Comedy is tragedy - plus time.

Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can't know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.

Female hysteria is a subject I'm very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy.

The energy in a comedy is very serious. Somebody said comedy is a tragedy plus time. When you have a tragedy, for example, like this, like, 'We're going to die,' and you have time, like, five hours to die, it becomes a comedy.

Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.

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.

Any scene in Shakespeare can be vulgarised almost out of recognition with the wish to have a modern concept.

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.

Very few people took sordid things and made comedies out of them.

All great humorists are sad... I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest - the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

Satire is tragedy plus time.

I feel like we can prove in real time the old trope that comedy is tragedy plus time.

Tragedy plus time equals humor.

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.

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.

If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well.

Humor is tragedy plus time.

True wit, to every man, is that which falls on another.

Comedy is tragedy plus timing.

The thing I try to get across to the writers - and I do a lot of writing, too - is that when I do stand-up, nothing I talk about is funny. Everything is really sad and tragic and then I make it funny.

The more serious the situation, the funnier the comedy can be. The greatest comedy plays against the greatest tragedy. Comedy is a red rubber ball and if you throw it against a soft, funny wall, it will not come back. But if you throw it against the hard wall of ultimate reality, it will bounce back and be very lively. Very, very few people understand this.

His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.