Top 100 Comedy Is Tragedy Quotes
#1. If comedy is tragedy plus time, I need more fucking time. But I would really settle for less fucking tragedy." ~ Jon Stewart
Chris Smith
#4. Comedy is tragedy revisited or hostility. It is mock hostility, of course, or it would be ugly; we would have a war.
Phyllis Diller
#5. Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
Angela Carter
#6. Comedy is tragedy plus time, but the time is different for everybody.
Mike Birbiglia
#7. Comedy is tragedy standing on its head with its pants down.
Chris Crutcher
#9. The problem is that I work in more than one genre. It's impossible for me to aim for a single one because, for me, comedy is mixed with tragedy. That's very Spanish, the way in which comedy and tragedy are inextricable from each other.
Pedro Almodovar
#10. Mankind is immortal
in the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of nature
but by virtue of man's subjection to it. The "fall" in tragedy ends in
death; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where, by natures's arithmetic,
one and one make a brand new one.
Rose A. Zimbardo
#11. Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you're seeing.
Lauren Groff
#12. Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
#13. Female hysteria is a subject I'm very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy.
Rachel Cusk
#14. And in the vine of the divine,
There is a fine line;
Between tragedy and comedy,
That a man cannot define.
Stephan Attia
#15. It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. I always think a good sports movie is emblematic in the same way that a great Greek tragedy really has a certain kind of structure, or a Shakespearean play if you're looking at a comedy or a tragedy, is that these are the heights and depths of human emotion.
Carla Gugino
#17. In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
Wislawa Szymborska
#18. Life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.
Moliere
#19. I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy.
Billy Joel
#20. We all know what tragedy is. "Yes, I'd rather not have any more tragedy, please. I'll have comedy, please." Comedy, in the Greek sense, only means that it has a happy ending.
Eric Drooker
#21. Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.
Mel Brooks
#22. Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.
Jesse Kellerman
#23. Human comedy is more profound than tragedy. In tragedy we die and it is very sad. In comedy we avoid death, and it is even sadder.
Jennifer Stone
#24. There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
Erma Bombeck
#25. Comedy is merely tragedy happening to someone else.
W.C. Fields
#26. The rendering of my thoughts, emotions, and experiences is part comedy and part tragedy as well as history, for life is such a mingling.
Karen Harper
#28. Why do we laugh at such terrible things? Because comedy is often the sarcastic realization of inescapable tragedy.
Bryant H. McGill
#29. In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.
Christopher Fry
#30. The energy in a comedy is very serious. Somebody said comedy is a tragedy plus time. When you have a tragedy, for example, like this, like, 'We're going to die,' and you have time, like, five hours to die, it becomes a comedy.
Javier Camara
#31. He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
G.K. Chesterton
#32. There are a lot of questions I keep asking myself about why I do comedy. I guess I laugh to keep from crying. And I guess if you ever get me crying, I might not stop. This is the way I look at tragedy or else I'll cry.
Bob Newhart
#33. The basis of tragedy is man's helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man's helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power).
Dawn Powell
#34. Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
Jean Racine
#35. Even amidst tragedy there is laughter, sometimes farce. The degree of farce depends on who is running the tragedy.
Daniel Prokop
#36. Every actor knows that tragedy, being linear and inevitable, is taxing - but comedy, which depends on the element of surprise, is the hardest act of all.
Robin Morgan
#37. Life is not a tragedy, it is a comedy. To be alive means to have a sense of humor.
Rajneesh
#38. It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.
Philip K. Dick
#39. It has been said that life is a tragedy to those who think and a comedy to those who feel.
Bruce Watson
#40. Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.
Sarah Moss
#41. A formula for comedy is comedy equals tragedy plus time. A difficult or uncomfortable situation takes place, and then you laugh about it later down the road.
Brian Regan
#42. Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.
John Guare
#43. Comedy is deemed inferior to tragedy primarily because of the social prevalence of narcissistic pathology. In other words people who are too self important to laugh at their own frequently ridiculous behavior have vested interest in gravity because it supports their illusions of grandosity.
Tom Robbins
#44. Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
Sholem Aleichem
#45. The purpose of life is to endure tragedy as well as comedy in hopes of sharing a story with a happy ending.
Jes Fuhrmann
#46. Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis.
Subcomandante Marcos Laura Castellanos
#47. Humor is not funny. Humor is something else. Funny is a joke, sometimes silly. Comedy is deep and connected to tragedy; comedy could be deeper than tragedy, in my view.
Gerald Stern
#48. It is observable that the ladies frequent tragedies more than comedies; the reason may be, that in tragedy their sex is deified and adored, in comedy exposed and ridiculed.
Alexander Pope
#49. I find it very difficult to be funny, it's much easier to do tragedy than it is to do comedy.
Eric Drooker
#50. There's no such thing as an uninteresting life, such a thing is an impossibility. Beneath the dullest exterior, there is a drama, a comedy, a tragedy.
Mark Twain
#51. The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#52. A comedy is just a tragedy interrupted, I once said. Do you finish with the kiss or when she opens her eyes to tell him she loves him and sees blonde hairs on his collar?
Alan Ayckbourn
#53. A life without trouble and tragedy is boring and not a plot for comedy.
Debasish Mridha
#54. I was sort of trained in drama. I went to theater school. I started on the stage. Comedy is absolutely an essential part of what we do as actors. But I think in the grand scheme of things, comedy was born from tragedy. First there was tragedy and then there were the comedies.
Alex O'Loughlin
#55. A farce or comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home.
Abraham Lincoln
#58. I think comedy is drama, often. It's hard to have comedy over a period of time - commercials are one thing, but over a period of time - comedy and tragedy go hand in hand.
Gore Verbinski
#59. Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
Charlie Chaplin
#60. There is a point in portraying surface vulgarity where tragedy and comedy are very close.
Barbara Stanwyck
#61. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
Susan Sontag
#62. Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.
Jeannette Walls
#63. The ability to understand and deliver comedy and tragedy is extremely rare in one composer.
Signe Baumane
#64. The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.
Dawn Powell
#65. Running my show is really like an actor being in repertory but where, in one day in one performance, you do scenes from a drama, a farce, a low comedy and a tragedy.
Dick Cavett
#66. I've only made short films and two features, which are very different. One is a surreal comedy, and the other is a period tragedy. I'm curious to know what misconceptions this could trigger
Sophie Barthes
#68. And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.
Miguel De Unamuno
#69. Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune
Susanne Katherina Langer
#70. Life is neither comedy or tragedy, life is what you make of it.
Radha Mitchell
#71. The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the relief of tears. Disgust and terror are the other points of the compass.
Laurence Olivier
#72. Comedy and tragedy are basically the same thing. Comedy is just the art of making light of life's sufferings. Turning all your pain into a joke.
Katie Kacvinsky
#73. Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.
Margaret Cho
#74. Meanwhile, however, it is quite otherwise, meanwhile the comedy of existence has not yet " become conscious " of itself, meanwhile it is still the period of tragedy, the period of morals and religions.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#75. There is something of tragedy and a 'comedy of eternal errors' when we attempt to write great scripts of rescue when we are the ones in need of rescue.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#76. The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
Horace Walpole
#77. Tragedy is what happens to me; comedy is what happens to you.
Mel Brooks
#78. In a simple street you can find the whole world: You can find joy and sorrow; you can find good and evil, silence and noise; you can find all the comedies and all the tragedies! An ordinary simple street is the mirror of the whole world!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#79. I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.
Roberto Benigni
#80. Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.
Elbert Hubbard
#81. There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.
Ellen Page
#82. Chess is a game sufficiently rich in meaning that it is easily capable of containing elements of both tragedy and comedy.
Luke McShane
#83. Human life is an incongruous combination of tragedy and comedy.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#84. There is nothing in human affairs that is a true subject for ridicule. Beneath comedy lies the ferment of tragedy; the farcical is but a cloak for coming catastrophe.
Gabriel Chevallier
#85. Winter's notion of poetry is tragedy. It knows nothing of comedy. Its laughter was frozen on its lips long ago.
William Alfred Quayle
#87. LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.
MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.
Oscar Wilde
#88. Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy.
Alvar Aalto
#89. There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
Mark Twain
#90. Groundhog Day was pretty clean. It may have to do with some puritanical feeling that comedy is a forbidden pleasure in a certain way. They make you laugh, and laughter is somehow an inferior emotion to tragedy.
Harold Ramis
#91. Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.
Pico Iyer
#92. LORD ILLINGWORTH. I never intend to grow old. The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. MRS. ALLONBY. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy. LORD
Oscar Wilde
#93. Life is replete with comedy, drama, horror, suspense, tragedy, romance, mystery, fantasy and a good dose of fiction. While at times the plot may seem to be lacking, the special effects alone are well worth the price of admission.
Derek R. Audette
#94. The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.
Horace Walpole
#95. Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
Bernard Malamud
#96. Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, comedy, farce, or tragedy, by a dramatis personae, the 'self', and so it will be until the curtain drops.
Charles Scott Sherrington
#97. The comedy of the wicked,
Is the tragedy of the saint;
But the saint's comedy,
Is the wicked's remedy.
Stephan Attia
#98. Life is a double-faced creature; one face is tragedy, the other one is comedy. We have no way but to face the first face with dignity!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#99. Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
Mel Brooks
#100. Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.
Robyn Schneider
