Human Comedy Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I do find things funny. When you see life through the eyes of someone with a good sense of humor, which my grandmother did, life is a human comedy.

George Takei

#3. As for the world of fashion and celebrity, I have the usual interest in the human comedy, but the problems of depiction absorb me more.

David Hockney

#4. There is even - as with no other game - a fascinating detective literature, a wry commentary on the human comedy, implicit in the book of rules.

Alistair Cooke

#5. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.

Elliott Erwitt

#6. Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation,however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy.

Robert Harris

#7. 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

#8. America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! it never lets you down!

Tom Wolfe

#9. The human comedy begins with a vertical smile.

Richard Condon

#10. The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls ... but where is it?

Eugene Ionesco

#11. I'm a huge fan of Jack Lemmon, he was someone who managed to tread that line between comedy and tragedy and sometimes give very big performances, but they were never over-demonstrative and they were never not based on a kind of real truthful human being.

Steve Coogan

#12. Foreign audiences are used to seeing Mexico in other sorts of movies. 'Casi divas' is a step toward a more commercially successful cinema, without the violence, blood and exaggerations. The movie reflects a more human Mexico, while remaining a chick flick, although it is not a romantic comedy.

Ana Layevska

#13. As it turns out, if you freeze improperly packed human remains (i.e. balling them up willy-nilly and jamming them under a couple frozen turkeys and a max pack of Hot Pockets,) just like with animal remains...

E.V. Iverson

#14. I am a passionate believer that comedy is a way of tackling some of the most dark and difficult aspects of being a human being.

Stephen Mangan

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Human life is a comedy-one must play it seriously.

Alexandre Kojeve

#18. I just have one of those faces. People come up to me and say, 'What's wrong?' Nothing. 'Well, it takes more energy to frown than it does to smile.' Yeah, you know it takes more energy to point that out than it does to leave me alone?

Bill Hicks

#19. Horror is one of the few genres - romance and comedy are the other two that come to mind - that's all emotion-driven. It's not a rational genre, like science fiction is. It's irrational by nature. And it is capable of exploring all aspects of human experience.

Stephen R. Bissette

#20. It seemed to us that all people to a greater or lesser degree belong to one of these two types, that almost every one of us resembles either Don Quixote or Hamlet.

Ivan Turgenev

#21. I've always read books and loved human behavior since I was ten or twelve years old. Maybe even that's why I wanted to do comedy.

Dane Cook

#22. Movies serve many purposes, and I've visited many of those genres, from the most light, frivolous comedy that is just trying to make you laugh, to movies that explore the most complicated side of the human soul. As an actor, I play all of those things, and I still like it.

Antonio Banderas

#23. Human Millipede 6 was the highest-grossing movie of the summer and returned Nicholas Cage to Oscar-winning status.

C.Z. Hazard

#24. I think romantic comedy, when done right, is my favorite genre. It's just a genre that's very human.

Lena Dunham

#25. This is one of his most human and most amusing and witty novels. The characters are very Indian. I decided that I wanted to do a comedy, so this was just the right one.

Ismail Merchant

#26. Human life is an incongruous combination of tragedy and comedy.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#27. 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

#28. The landscape is television has changed so much, because there are so many outlets, that the odds of getting a zeitgeisty hit - you know how 'American Idol' seems to appeal to every human being on the planet? Doing that in comedy nowadays is very, very hard.

Bill Lawrence

#29. There's no such thing as a limit on being the best. You can always go for more. That's what it means to be human. No... That's what it means to be me. - Claire Stanfield

Ryohgo Narita

#30. There is nothing more profoundly serious than real comedy, which is an affirmation of human communion, redemption and grace.

Michael Malone

#31. 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

#32. I think it's great training for any comedian to start on cows. Because with cows, you expect them to be bored and just stare at you blankly. And that's exactly what you'll get at a comedy club. If you can toughen up with a cow audience, then you'll never be worried with a human audience.

Kristen Schaal

#33. I love comedy, but I actually do prefer drama because I am already animated as a human being.

Shanola Hampton

#34. I love doing comedy. You don't get many good comedy scripts. They're rare. But, I do love playing comedy. Even in drama, I like to try to find the humor because I think it's very human.

Colm Meaney

#35. You do develop a taste as an actress: Chekhov, Ayckbourn: it's the combination of comedy and human drama. I would never want to do anything without comedy.

Katherine Parkinson

#36. I think you can tell the human condition better through comedy.

Hector Elizondo

#37. If the existence of human beings leads to nothing, what is all this comedy about?

Camille Flammarion

#38. (Can human beings change? The humor, and the sadness, of remarriage comedies can be said to result from the fact that we have no good answer to that question.)

Stanley Cavell

#39. I guess what I always found funny was the human condition. There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents. Like, when a driver has parked his car crookedly and then wonders why he has the bad luck of being hit.

John Prine

#40. [Hillary Clinton] and I are fine. Are we going to be besties for the rest of our lives? No.

Claire McCaskill

#41. Now, where does my comedy come from, like, as a human being? Yeah, when I was a kid I was dyslexic and had to go to special-ed every day and felt stupid about that and got very witty to defend myself.

Dax Shepard

#42. The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#43. I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world.

Mindy Kaling

#44. Peepo Choo is avant-garde! ... It is both comedy and drama! It is both the wildest fiction and the most sobering reality! It's about love and hate! About passion! About being human! It's about life!!!

Felipe Smith

#45. Few things are as uniquely painful as bad comedy, and the realization that the human mind is a house of mirrors with no entrance and no exit.

Dov Davidoff

#46. 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

#47. Now, because of this big backdrop that we've given ourselves, these little personal, human details take on a whole new context and give us opportunities for comedy.

Jason Winer

#48. If it's strictly comedy, I like to bring some darkness to it. If it's strictly drama, I always like to lighten it up as well. I like to find some kind of dimension and make my characters human, so that it doesn't feel like a sketch and feels more like a slice of life.

Nestor Carbonell

#49. No one likes the fellow who is all rogue, but we'll forgive him almost anything if there is warmth of human sympathy underneath his rogueries. The immortal types of comedy are just such men.

W.C. Fields

#50. There is no character in the comedy of human life more difficult to play well than that of an old bachelor.

Washington Irving

#51. The Room is a drama that is also a comedy that is also an existential cry for help that is finally a testament to human endurance.

Greg Sestero

#52. The interesting trick of comedy, in a lot of ways, is to have both the comedy and the grounding of the real thing. You get a real sense of a human being.

Natasha Lyonne

#53. Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.

George Meredith

#54. I would love to play a normal human being with a little bit of a comedic bend that had a love interest. I would love to explore comedy, like a half-hour kind of single-camera comedy. I think that would kind of suit me best.

Reggie Lee

#55. So you want me to go to a human orgy, where I will not be welcome, and you want us to leave before I get to enjoy myself? ~Eric Northman

Charlaine Harris

#56. A lot of the kind of comedy that I do comes out of real human moments. For them to work, they have to be truthful kinds of things that people in the audience can go, "Yes, I've experienced that myself!"

Brian Regan

#57. Knowing comedy is knowing human nature.

Patton Oswalt

#58. The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

Mary McCarthy

#59. Monsters, show me the monsters: these people out on the street.

My people.

Jose Eduardo Agualusa

#60. The sole agents, indeed, in the action of her novels are individual human beings. And the comedy is the outcome of their making fools of themselves and of one another.

Mary Lascelles

#61. I think we're the only jokeless show on television. I mean really, we have no setups and no punch lines. It's not a joke show. There are funny lines and funny moments but again the comedy is born of the human experience and awkward pauses are a great part of what it is to be human.

Rainn Wilson

#62. For me, comedy is a day-to-day report on the human condition. It's what's happening right now. I get maybe 20 minutes of my act straight from the newspaper.

Elayne Boosler