Comedy Tragedy Quotes

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

The fine line between roaring with laughter and crying because it's a disaster is a very, very fine line. You see a chap slip on a banana skin in the street and you roar with laughter when he falls slap on his backside. If in doing so you suddenly see he's broken a leg, you very quickly stop laughing and it's not a joke anymore.

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

I'm getting older, so how people face grave circumstances is of interest to me. And you meet a lot of people who are very courageous, and it doesn't reek of something funny to write about, but I always think that the higher the stakes, the bigger the laughs can be, and the more emotional the scenes can be.

I've always been a clown trapped in a leading man's body.

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.

The thing with 'No Man's Land' is not to see it, but how to make people to go to see it. The one negative criticism I've heard is that the relationship between tragedy and comedy is so perfect that it becomes suspicious. I take it as a complement.

I did a production of Macbeth in the 1960s in which I had a swordfight in the final scene. But the blade fell off my sword just as I was stabbing the guy. I ended up having to hammer him to death.

There's comedy in tragedy, and tragedy in comedy. There's always light and dark in most jobs. Whether it's framed as a comedy, drama or tragedy, you try to mix it up within that. You can work on a comedy and it's not laugh-a-minute off set. You can work on a tragedy that's absolutely hilarious.

I naturally think in terms of comedy whenever I see anything because tragedy is so close to comedy, so I like to add the tragedy to the comedy or a little bit of comedy to the tragedy in order to make them both feel more real to me.

When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.

I think that it's so powerful for me to go see someone like Bridget Everett at Joe's Pub and watch her weave her songs in and out of these funny, tragic stories - you can talk and sing and it's not this horrible offense, you're going to get thrown in artistic jail.

To me, when something's really funny, there's, like, a wildness to it, and it's very close to the wildness of something potentially tragic or gross. It's all very close to each other when you have that extreme level of feeling.

I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.

The script for 'Infamous' was so poised between tragedy and comedy. It's a dream part. One reads those scripts with a sense of melancholia. When you read a script that good... I remember thinking, 'Oh, this script is too good. They'll never give it to me.'

But it is only in epic tragedies that gloom is unrelieved. In real life tragedy and comedy are so intermingled that when one is most wretched ridiculous things happen to make one laugh in spite of oneself.

A movie is painting, it's photography, it's literature - because you have to have the screenplay - it's music. Put a different soundtrack to a comedy and it's a tragedy.

Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.

I think comedy is drama, often. It's hard to have comedy over a period of time - commercials are one thing, but over a period of time - comedy and tragedy go hand in hand.

In a clown, we see what we do that makes us laugh and cry. I kept the white face, the tradition of the Pierrot. My clown became a romantic and stylized figure. I wanted to be an abstract and concrete figure, a symbol of humanity.

I'm a tearless clown. If I were to get a tattoo, it would be the two masks, and they would be both smiling.

The problem is that I work in more than one genre. It's impossible for me to aim for a single one because, for me, comedy is mixed with tragedy. That's very Spanish, the way in which comedy and tragedy are inextricable from each other.

You can't be funny unless you're tragic, and you can't be tragic unless you're funny.

Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears!