God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn.

Self-parody is the first portent of age.

Professional comedians, surprisingly, have a lack of humor. They're insensitive to the insanity of our times.

There's humor in everything. There's gotta be humor in everything.

Comedy is funny when it comes from truth, and that's always the rule of them. It's about how far you can push that boundary.

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

Much of the best humor is found in the frequently tragic reality of human experience.

Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.

Actually being funny is mostly telling the truth about things.

Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.

I can't not put humor in a book.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.

A farce, or slapstick humor, does well universally.

Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Politics is developing more comedians than radio ever did.

And humor has always been a weapon. You want to get even on somebody? You want to attack somebody? Make fun of them.

Humor helps ease the tension of race and the differences in society. If there wasn't comedy I don't know if Obama could have ever become president.

Humor - I see it as a survival skill.

I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early '70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire.

Funny is an attitude.

It's both funny and sad which seem to me to be the two basic ingredients of good comedy.

What other people call dark and despairing, I call funny.

Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

Humor is reason gone mad.

G.I. humor is similar to cop humor.

The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.

Hard comedy goes for the fences. It's also what you might call take-a-risk comedy because if you don't hit a home run, you might strike out. It's either a belly laugh or it's no go and no show.

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.

Humor can be an incredible lacerating and effective weapon. And that is the way I use it.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

One of the interesting things about comedy is it's tension release, and nothing creates tension faster than anger.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.