Top 100 Quotes About Tragedy And Comedy
#1. And in the vine of the divine,
There is a fine line;
Between tragedy and comedy,
That a man cannot define.
Stephan Attia
#2. 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
#3. 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
#5. 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
#6. Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.
John Guare
#7. 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
#8. Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.
Frederick Buechner
#9. There is a point in portraying surface vulgarity where tragedy and comedy are very close.
Barbara Stanwyck
#10. Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.
Jeannette Walls
#11. But it is only in epic tragedies that gloom is unrelieved. In real life tragedy and comedy are so intermingled that when one is most wretched ridiculous things happen to make one laugh in spite of oneself.
Georgette Heyer
#12. 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
#13. Chess is a game sufficiently rich in meaning that it is easily capable of containing elements of both tragedy and comedy.
Luke McShane
#14. Human life is an incongruous combination of tragedy and comedy.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. The Gold Rush(1925) affirmed Charlie Chaplin's belief that tragedy and comedy are never far apart.
Steven Jay Schneider
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you're seeing.
Lauren Groff
#21. Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.
Moliere
#31. I look for every opportunity to mix comedy and horror and tragedy. I love catching audiences off-guard.
John Lithgow
#32. 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
#33. 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. 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
#38. Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.
Mel Brooks
#39. Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.
Jesse Kellerman
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
Erma Bombeck
#43. '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
#44. 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
#45. When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.
Mason Cooley
#46. I trained in Shakespeare, and that's all comedy, even when it's tragedy.
Olivia Thirlby
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
G.K. Chesterton
#50. Vegas means comedy, tragedy, happiness and sadness all at the same time.
Artie Lange
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. It was always a delicate balance, life and death, comedy and tragedy.
Chris Kyle
#58. 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
#59. It has been said that life is a tragedy to those who think and a comedy to those who feel.
Bruce Watson
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. If I got a paper cut, that's a tragedy. If you fell down an open manhole and died, that's comedy.
Woody Allen
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Classical ornament here and there accentuated the contrast; caryatides and carved masks of comedy or tragedy looked
G.K. Chesterton
#67. 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
#68. God always comes up with a third act twist
and we won't know until we die whether the play was a comedy or a tragedy.
Joan Rivers
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. A life without trouble and tragedy is boring and not a plot for comedy.
Debasish Mridha
#72. 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
#73. Maybe he was a softy, but that was okay. Being hardened by this world, I figured, was a true tragedy, and Lincoln didn't belong in a tragedy. A comedy of errors, possibly, but not a tragedy. For as long as I was in his life, I wouldn't let that be the outcome.
Megan Squires
#74. 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
#75. The ability to understand and deliver comedy and tragedy is extremely rare in one composer.
Signe Baumane
#76. It's so laughable that it's somewhere beyond comedy and right into tragedy again.
Libba Bray
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. There's comedy in tragedy, and tragedy in comedy. There's always light and dark in most jobs. Whether it's framed as a comedy, drama or tragedy, you try to mix it up within that. You can work on a comedy and it's not laugh-a-minute off set. You can work on a tragedy that's absolutely hilarious.
Harry Treadaway
#81. And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.
Miguel De Unamuno
#82. Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#83. 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
#84. I am very interested in that fine line between fiction and reality and between comedy and tragedy - and pushing the line as much as possible.
Jill McCorkle
#85. 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
#86. The constituents of tragedy may be universally acknowledged, easily invoked and deeply felt, but the elements of comedy are, I think, more widely variable from person to person.
Paul Di Filippo
#87. Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#88. 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
#89. Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.
Margaret Cho
#90. After an hour of gliding though the crowd and two glasses of tepid wine later, Penelope had reached the spiritual state of being merrily tipsy. It was that perfect state when everything starts looking wonderful and every tragedy turns into a comedy.
Anya Wylde
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. And by this very difference tragedy stands apart in relation to comedy, for the latter intends to imitate those who are worse, and the former better, than people are now.
Aristotle.
#95. Some people watch comedy to relax. I watch '21 Grams.' I can recognize sadness and tragedy really easily because it's been with me forever.
Lykke Li
#96. A comedy ends with a wedding, and a tragedy ends with a funeral: you always have to juxtapose sex and death.
Chuck Palahniuk
#97. A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.
George Bernard Shaw
#98. 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
#99. You can perceive life as tragic, or you can laugh at the tragedy of it and that turns it into comedy. It doesn't change the circumstances.
Harold Ramis
#100. A movie is painting, it's photography, it's literature - because you have to have the screenplay - it's music. Put a different soundtrack to a comedy and it's a tragedy. A movie combines all those forms and forces you to pay attention for two hours with a group of people.
Paula Patton
