Tragic Humor Quotes

I've always thought the word cow was funny. And cows are sort of tragic figures. Cows blur the line between tragedy and humor.

His jest will savour but of shallow wit, When thousands weep, more than did laugh at it.

My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.

I'm more of a clown, a tragic clown. Yeah. I just like humor to come out of characters.

I find heartbreaking stuff really funny.

There are times when I wonder how I ever thought that I could dramatize the death of a national discussion as a family comedy.

I'm a big fan of gallows humor. When my aunt passed away, she was in a coma for a day before my cousins pulled the plug. And the amount of joking and base humor that went on that day around her bed was so insane. It's crazy how people talk when something horrible is happening.

I find that very appealing: the blurring of the lines between what's funny and what's tragic. And what's ordinary and what's not - the big things in the small things.

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.

Sorrow is never more sorrowful than when it jests at its own misery.

Have you seen the film Histoires D'Amérique? It's also a mixture of humor and monologue, and it shows how the Jewish humor comes from drama and tragedy.

That's what people forget about, is that when things are very, very powerful in a sad way, they have that possibility of also being over-the-top, hysterically funny.

When I think about Plastic Man, he was genuinely the first funny super hero. I'm obviously attracted to that. There's also this great mixture of tragedy in there, too, that I love. The humor comes from a place of pain.

Jerry Lewis has been married twenty times. He gets married on a Tuesday, they find his wife dead in a swimming pool on Thursday. Maybe if you married someone who's old enough to swim next time, Ok Jerry?

I don't really find things funny unless they're deeply tragic at the same time. I think if you're funny just for the sake of being funny, it's just frivolous nonsense. To me, all the best comic plays have been written about really serious and rather bleak things.

What some folks find funny, other folks find tragic.

Any tragic memory I have I also think is really funny. On any given day, I can think about how horrible something is and also how ridiculous and over-the-top it is.

If you are involved with the intensity of crescendo situations, with the intensity of tragedy, you might begin to see the humor of these situations as well. As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to hear the silence as part of the music.

There is humor in the specter of the worst disaster in our nation's history. All I have to do is sweep away the debris of shock to find it.

Humor requires distance — we’ve been living in a constantly refreshed state of “too soon” for jokes about school shooters ever since I graduated from high school, two months after the Columbine attack... psychologists ... have developed a framework called “benign violation theory” to describe events that lend themselves best to humor: a violation or a threat, but one from which the joker is somewhat removed. It’s unclear exactly how much distance we need to laugh about something as cataclysmic as nuclear attack.

Just trying to tell the truth about, you know, the struggle of - being alive is funny, it's just inherently tragic and also hilarious - in a fun way and in a sad way. That seems to connect with people.