Steve Allen Quotes

Man learns more readily and remembers more willingly what excites his ridicule than what deserves his esteem and respect.

The best comedy is where you attack the strong, not the weak.

In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.

Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

What is satire if not a marriage of civil disobedience to a laugh track, a potent brew of derision and lack of respect that acts as a nettle sting on the thin skin of the humourless?

I like the ironic pomposity of a stand-up comedian. Like all those comedians thinking they can bring down Coca-Cola. They forget to be funny.

I've done pretty well as a professional fed-up. The tools of my trade so far have been irony, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and supercilious contempt, but these are highly civilized weapons designed for 18th-century French salons.

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.

The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

There's always been this tradition of satirizing these rich groups of people.

Nothing gets a bigger laugh than when you refer to things like ethics or human rights.

Satire is fascinating stuff. It's deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it's the only thing that makes any sense.

Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile.

Facetiousness is allowable when it is the most proper instrument of exposing things apparently base and vile to due contempt.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?

I think to simply make fun of something isn't particularly interesting. I try to not just do a parody of something or belittle something or disparage something.

A little disdain is not amiss; a little scorn is alluring.

I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.

I don't really like using ridicule as a form of humor.

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.

The show is a satire, which gives us freedom to do anything we want. Satire is the magic word that wipes away any culpability. The media is jealous of this freedom.

Ridicule is the first and last argument of a fool.

Most of the bad taste I've been accused of has been generic bad taste; it's been making fun of an idea as opposed to a person.