“Comedy comes from conflict, from hatred.”
“Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.”
“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”
“I think being funny is not anyone's first choice.”
“There is not one female comic who was beautiful as a little girl.”
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
“All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.”
“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
“Though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve.”
“My routines come out of total unhappiness. My audiences are my group therapy.”
“Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.”
“Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.”
“The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.”
“Charlie Chaplin's genius was in comedy. He has no sense of humor, particularly about himself.”
“The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.”
“Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.”
“And I did laugh sans intermission an hour by his dial. O noble fool, a worthy fool -- motley's the only wear.”
“If I get a hard audience they are not going to get away until they laugh. Those seven laughs a minute -- I've got to have them.”
“While awaiting sentencing, I decided to give stand-up comedy a shot. The judge had suggested I get my act together, and I took him seriously.”
“In comedy, reconcilement with life comes at the point when to the tragic sense only an inalienable difference or dissension with life appears.”
“I was doing stand-up at a restaurant and there was a chalkboard on the street out front. It said, ''Soup of the Day: Cream of Asparagus. Ellen DeGeneres.''”
“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”
“The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.”
“When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.”
“The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it... try to fake three laughs in an hour -- ha ha ha ha ha -- they'll take you away, man. You can't.”
“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.”
“I always loved comedy, but I never knew it was something you could learn to do. I always thought that some people are born comedians ... just like some people are born dentists.”
“The guy has baggy pants, flat feet, the most miserable, bedraggled-looking little bastard you ever saw; makes itchy gestures as though he's got crabs under his arms -- but he's funny.”
“Comedy naturally wears itself out -- destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.”
“We mustn't complain too much of being comedians -- it's an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed -- that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.”