God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.
Garrison Keillor

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.
Woody Allen

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
Erma Bombeck

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
Sholom Aleichem

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
Charlie Chaplin

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
Charlie Chaplin

We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.
Fred Allen

Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail.
Benito Mussolini

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
Aldous Huxley

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
Mel Brooks

Friends applaud, the comedy is over.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.
Mel Brooks

Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.
Mel Brooks

Yeah, well I've always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre and that's really where my training is. As an actor, that's my training.
Christopher Walken

It's fun to do a comedy and hook people in and then hoodwink them into watching a serious movie. I like to lead in with the comedy and then hit them over the head with a drama.
Reese Witherspoon

I don't like to be entertaining. I don't like the feeling of being entertaining. If there was a musical or a comedy that was not just for entertainment but was rooted in something I could relate to on a real level, then I think I would do it.
Ryan Gosling

The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.
James Thurber

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.
James Thurber

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
James Thurber

I'm doing comedy development at National Lampoon.
Kato Kaelin