Satirical Wit Quotes

I live a very Kenneth Williams-like existence.

If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.

HUMORIST, n. A plague that would have softened down the hoar austerity of Pharaoh's heart and persuaded him to dismiss Israel with his best wishes, cat-quick.

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.

satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

Comedy holds the greatest risk for an actor, and laughter is the reward.

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.

Cynicism is the humor of hatred.

Roy Blount, who is the funniest person I know, journeys deep into the dark heart of humor and brings back a wonderfully insightful, superbly crafted song of the soul that had me laughing and crying too

I think New Yorkers - they're media savvy. People have a sense of humor.

Lucifer has a sense of fun about life; he just likes to play with people. But the sense of humor of the show is what makes the show entertaining as opposed to dark.

To me, real comedy comes out of behavior. It's the choices you make as an actor. It's never about, "I want to do a comedy script." I can't think of it that way. And besides, some of those movies, those comedy movies, I can't even watch them.

Some sarcasm is best told simply. Some humor is best told big and some is best told small.

Sarcasm is not the rapier of wit its wielders seem to believe it to be, but merely a club: it may, by dint of brute force, occasionally raise bruises, but it never cuts or pierces.

To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx.

Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.

Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar.

Gonzo . . . acidic hilarity . . . 'The Fun Parts' has fine moments, but it's not the whole Lipsyte story. Read it with 'The Ask' if you really want to know how a mordant jokester with a madman's imagination became a literary rock star.

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

People think drama drives story, but I think the comedy is really the heart and soul.

In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.

The Wodehouse language is so rich and detailed and hilarious.