David Farr Quotes

I tend to find comedy in dark places. I also tend to find comedy in taking on the status quo - which has always been something I find important.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

Very few people took sordid things and made comedies out of them.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.

It is difficult not to write satire.

With Portlandia, I don't think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We're okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.

When Kubrick decided to go the black comedy route with his movie, he thought of me to give it that flavor.

The best cartoons work by making fun of sacred cows, in trying to inflict the uncomfortable.

I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.

I think comedy and satire are the strongest ways to deal with very serious themes and very painful themes.

All comedy is funny because it tells us truths that we recognise through laughter, but that doesn't mean it can't be unnerving. Think of 'Fawlty Towers'; it can be very, very dark, but by God, it's funny. The two things are not in opposition.

In my comedy, I'm not always trying to say something, but when I'm playing a creepy dude, you're laughing because you know that creepy dude. You've heard that dude say something awful, and I'm just putting a little creative spin on it.

If written with enough care and thoughtfulness, a joke can make you laugh at a belief you hold dear.

People say the comedy is so shocking, but if you read newspapers or look around generally - I mean, obviously I'm not writing about all the lovely things that there are, which I do see as well - but there is a lot of outrageousness around, slightly covered up. And obviously, it's fun to take that a little bit further.

The definition of comedy is 'unsafe space' - you can't control what people laugh at.

I would love to be part of dark comedies. I love them! They are no-nonsense, no spoonfeeding, and the norms and cliches are left behind.

Comedy exists to laugh at things that aren't laughable. But isn't it? That's what separates us from the animals. We laugh.

I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.

Taking the humour out of Dickens, it's not Dickens any more.

It's always been said that comedy comes mostly out of the dark side anyway.

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