The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it ... try to fake three laughs in an hour--ha ha ha ha ha--they'll t...ake you away, man. You can't.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Comedy is an intellectual affair, and deals chiefly with logic. Tragedy is an emotional affair, and deals chiefly with value. Hora...ce Walpole once said that "life is a comedy to the man who thinks and a tragedy to the man who feels." Comedy is negative; it is a criticism of limitations and an unwillingness to accept them. Tragedy is positive; it is an uncritical acceptance of the positive content of that which is delimited. Since comedy deals with the limitations of actual situations and tragedy with their positive content, comedy must ridicule and tragedy must endorse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience we strive against ...every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition we trust the arduous eccentricities we're born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Comedy naturally wears itself out--destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the folli...es and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great silent movies revolve around the body and the personality of its owner; the great sound comedies revolve about structure... and style--what happens, how it happens, and the way those happenings are depicted. Film comedy, as well as film art in general, was born from delight in physical movement. The essence of early filmmaking was to take some object (animate or inanimate) and simply watch it move.... The sound comedy is far more literary. Given the opportunity to use the essential tool of literature, words, as an intrinsic part of the film's conception, the filmmaker did not hesitate to do so. In silent films, the use of words in titles was intrusive, a deliberate interruption of the cinematic medium and a substitution of the literary one. We stop looking and start reading. But the sound film provided the means to watch the action and listen to the words at the same time. Whereas the silent performer was a physical being,... the sound performer was both physical and intellectual at once.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The deeply thoughtful and human consciousness of a Macbeth is not found in comedy. Comic action tends to be as Bergson described i...t, physical or purblind, instead of highly conscious. Similarly, the great comic actor specializes in the presentation of mental obtuseness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Father told me if I could get my fingers to ballet the typewriter keys... to Nureyev the steno pad everything would be perfect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Quince. Marry, our play is "The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe." Bottom. A very good piece... of work, I assure you, and a merry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The function of comedy is to dispel ... unconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysis ...right on to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »