Art Buchwald Quotes

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.

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.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

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.'

It's a challenge to do satire when the thing you're satirizing is almost beyond satire, but I think that's a challenge for everybody.

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

If nothing is serious anymore, then there's nothing to satirize.

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.

But in terms of satire and comedy, our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine.

It is difficult not to write satire.

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.

Bad times for the Republic are great times for satire.

There is no place for a person like me in a world that only takes itself seriously. Satire is so necessary but fairly ineffective.

Satire, whether it be satire or not, everything has to have boundaries.

I think satire is most effective when you love the thing you're satirizing rather than... have a vendetta against it.

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

Mike Judge is my Jonathan Swift, and I say that because I don't know any other satirists. But the problem with satire is that it's so easily misinterpreted.

In a satire, you need foolishness.

Comedy actually works best when you're living in an OK world, and you are pointing out the hypocrisy in apathy.

If you look at 'Network' or any kind of satire, it's fundamentally unemotional in some ways.

People say the comedy is so shocking, but if you read newspapers or look around generally - I mean, obviously I'm not writing about all the lovely things that there are, which I do see as well - but there is a lot of outrageousness around, slightly covered up. And obviously, it's fun to take that a little bit further.

A lot of French comedy is satire.

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

Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.