Top 100 Comedy Tragedy Sayings
#1. I'm interested in ordinary experience, and regardless of the precise definition of ordinary, and I've found that in so-called ordinary experience, there is as much comedy, tragedy, sadness, as there is in great drama. And I don't invent it, I recognize it.
Frederick Wiseman
#2. Vegas means comedy, tragedy, happiness and sadness all at the same time.
Artie Lange
#4. The difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy is something awful happening to somebody else, while comedy is something awful happening to somebody else.
Aaron Allston
#5. More than any other setting - more than battlefields or boardrooms or a spaceship headed for intergalactic travel - I'll put my money on the family to provide an endless source of comedy, tragedy and intrigue.
Joyce Maynard
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. My thing was always more character-driven comedies, not sketch comedy - not that there's not room for both or one isn't enjoyable, just my personal taste, I like movies that comedy comes from out of flaws of people, things that are uncomfortable, out of tragedy.
Vince Vaughn
#9. Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you're seeing.
Lauren Groff
#10. Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
#11. 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
#12. If comedy is tragedy plus time, I need more fucking time. But I would really settle for less fucking tragedy." ~ Jon Stewart
Chris Smith
#13. There is no essential difference between the material of comedy and tragedy. All depends on the point of view of the dramatist, which, by clever emphasis, he tries to make the point of view of his audience.
George Pierce Baker
#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. The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which everyone is married in the last act.
George Bernard Shaw
#17. Life, I'd heard someone say, is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. It seemed to me that it was both at once, even for those of us who don't do much of either.
Lawrence Block
#18. Tragedy and comedy involve an audience, so they must give--sharing themselves to elicit tears and laughter. Melodrama is not such a strategist. It meets no one's expectation but its internal need to feel.
Yiyun Li
#19. Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can't know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.
Arthur Smith
#20. Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are
Arthur Koestler
#21. I feel as if I could be any thing or every thing, as if I could rant and storm, or sigh, or cut capers in any tragedy or comedy in the English language.
Jane Austen
#22. 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
#23. If Shakespeare thought comedy worthwhile, that means the rest of us can take a break from tragedy now and then without betraying our calling, even if the modern professional intellectual, a poseur by nature, has yet to discover this.
Mark Helprin
#24. In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
Wislawa Szymborska
#25. Life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.
Moliere
#26. My own inclination is to skew towards humor. They say that some people view life as a comedy, others as a tragedy. Me? Comedy all the way.
Lauren Willig
#27. Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it.
Mason Cooley
#28. I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy.
Billy Joel
#29. I look for every opportunity to mix comedy and horror and tragedy. I love catching audiences off-guard.
John Lithgow
#30. 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
#31. The preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both ...
Frederick Buechner
#32. Tragedy turns into comedy when you watch your own drama and realizing it as a mind-created fiction designed to create you a sense of identity.
Eckhart Tolle
#34. I come from a very expressive family, so it's really not surprising that we became actors. There was a lot of real-life drama in our house. Some of it was drama, some of it was comedy and some of it was comic-tragedy.
John Turturro
#35. His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.
Samuel Johnson
#37. Her occupation was the worst that anyone could think of. No guest in the park had to think of it because, unlike the wandering dwarf women, her job had no bearing on paper.
Pam Jones
#38. If you have no tragedy, you have no comedy. Crying and laughing are the same emotion. If you laugh too hard, you cry. And vice versa.
Sid Caesar
#39. Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.
Mel Brooks
#40. On the golf course, a man may be the dogged victim of inexorable fate, be struck down by an appalling stroke of tragedy, become the hero of unbelievable melodrama, or the clown in a side-splitting comedy.
Bobby Jones
#41. Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.
Jesse Kellerman
#42. 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
#43. When I started acting, my whole focus and intention was to work as a stage actor in a company where you're asked to different roles - do a comedy, do a tragedy, etc. I haven't had any reservations about jumping from one type of genre to another.
Kyle MacLachlan
#44. Fate cast me to play the role of an ugly duckling with no promise of swanning ... I have played my life as a comedy rather than the tragedy many would have made of it.
Marie Dressler
#45. There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
Erma Bombeck
#46. 'King of California' was just, I thought, a really great, fresh, original kind of script. I loved the tone, the mix of tragedy, comedy, and drama, and that it was a good part.
Michael Douglas
#48. One can play comedy, two are required for melodrama, but a tragedy demands three.
Elbert Hubbard
#49. Comedy is merely tragedy happening to someone else.
W.C. Fields
#50. 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
#51. When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.
Mason Cooley
#53. I trained in Shakespeare, and that's all comedy, even when it's tragedy.
Olivia Thirlby
#54. Why do we laugh at such terrible things? Because comedy is often the sarcastic realization of inescapable tragedy.
Bryant H. McGill
#56. Comedy is tragedy revisited or hostility. It is mock hostility, of course, or it would be ugly; we would have a war.
Phyllis Diller
#57. In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.
Christopher Fry
#58. 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
#59. He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
G.K. Chesterton
#60. Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
Angela Carter
#62. The script for 'Infamous' was so poised between tragedy and comedy. It's a dream part. One reads those scripts with a sense of melancholia. When you read a script that good ... I remember thinking, 'Oh, this script is too good. They'll never give it to me.'
Toby Jones
#63. I've been very fortunate. I've been in theater, films, television, radio, tragedy, comedy, farce - I've been in a musical and in music halls, in pantomime. I was once ringmaster in a circus.
Donald Sinden
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
Jean Racine
#67. Even amidst tragedy there is laughter, sometimes farce. The degree of farce depends on who is running the tragedy.
Daniel Prokop
#68. Everything is 'just a story'. Tragedy, comedy, end of the world, what ever it's just a story. What matters is making sure it's heard.
Mira Grant
#69. The same distinction marks off Tragedy from Comedy; for Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life. III
Aristotle.
#70. 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
#71. In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature - or go insane
Charlie Chaplin
#72. But our comedies never endured long without a tragedy ...
John Smith
#73. It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#74. There's so much tragedy in people that we see every day that we don't have to make anything up. We don't have to invent anything. There are two items on the menu: comedy and tragedy.
Eric Drooker
#75. It was always a delicate balance, life and death, comedy and tragedy.
Chris Kyle
#76. People ask me whether I see 'Star Wars' as a comedy or a tragedy, but it's really neither - it's partly a history, like 'Henry V,' and partly a fantasy, like 'The Tempest.'
Ian Doescher
#78. Life is not a tragedy, it is a comedy. To be alive means to have a sense of humor.
Rajneesh
#79. 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
#80. It has been said that life is a tragedy to those who think and a comedy to those who feel.
Bruce Watson
#81. Comedy is tragedy plus time, but the time is different for everybody.
Mike Birbiglia
#83. 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
#84. Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.
Lenny Bruce
#85. 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
#86. I have remained true to my deepest convictions. I mean the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy - for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?
Penelope Fitzgerald
#87. Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.
John Guare
#88. 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
#89. If I got a paper cut, that's a tragedy. If you fell down an open manhole and died, that's comedy.
Woody Allen
#90. The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#91. Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
Sholem Aleichem
#92. The purpose of life is to endure tragedy as well as comedy in hopes of sharing a story with a happy ending.
Jes Fuhrmann
#93. Life is a tragedy for those who feel ... but a comedy for those who think
Brenda Walpole
#94. Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#95. Optimist: someone who isn't sure whether life is a tragedy or a comedy but is tickled silly just to be in the play.
Robert Breault
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Classical ornament here and there accentuated the contrast; caryatides and carved masks of comedy or tragedy looked
G.K. Chesterton
#99. 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
#100. I find it very difficult to be funny, it's much easier to do tragedy than it is to do comedy.
Eric Drooker
