ironic perspective Quotes

Irony won't save you from anything; humour doesn't do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing.

You just can't take yourself too seriously, especially in comedy. You shouldn't try to be funny, but you should try to be as honest as possible. The extreme end of honesty is usually what's funny. That's your job [as an actor]. You just have to let people see it.

Blessed is the satirist; and blessed the ironist; blessed the witty scoffer, and blessed the sentimentalist; for each, having seen one spoke of the wheel, thinks to have seen all, and is content.

There's certainly a portion of my brain that is always tuned to making wry observations about the world, but that portion of my brain was alive and well before Twitter.

What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.

Vaclav Havel had this great sense of humor. And you kind of felt that he was making a little bit fun of everything at the same time.

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

A satirist is someone who has a very skeptical view of human nature, but who still has the optimism to make some sort of a joke out of it. However brutal that joke might be.

It's a barrel of laughs, isn't it? It makes The Day After look like friggin'...insert name of cheerful thing here. It was one of the things that made me really worry about worst-case scenarios. There's something impish and probably somewhat therapeutic about thinking about those things.

Nothing's true that I say, because I don't really want to say anything. I don't think my life's that cool, and I don't think my opinion's that valid. They're just silly jokes. Usually I just take a topic that isn't funny at all, like Shakespeare, and work backwards. I just try to find an unfunny subject.

What I say is stupid. Who takes a comedian seriously? I'm doing sophisticated knock-knock jokes.

The great joke is that a realist is an optimistic pessimist. That's very witty. Whether it's truthful or not, that I don't know.

I'm easily persuaded that a really good novelist who gets inside somebody else's head could be serving a valuable purpose. I enjoy satirical novels that take a wry, humorous, ironic look at modern life.

I believe in irony. And if V-Day has taught me anything, it's that if you go out with artistic, outrageous irony and humor, people are drawn to it.

Laughter and irony are at heart reminders that we are not prisoners in this world, but voyagers through it.

Who trades in contradictions will not be contradicted.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.

A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.

Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life's sorrow with grace.

I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.

Nothing seems too high or low for the humorist; he is above honor, above faith, preserving sense in religion and sanity in life.

A sense of humour is a sense of proportion.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.