Greg Mottola Quotes

I try to write as serious as possible, and then a joke slips in.

I think that there's a fine line between comedy and drama.

Humour is a great vehicle for getting a message across. If you get too serious, you could die of starch.

Funny is when you're serious.

I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track. But yes, I don't like to get Maudlin. And I have a tendency towards it.

There is nothing that is so serious that you can't also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things.

I guess the more serious you play something, if the context is funny, then it will be funny and it doesn't really require you to be necessarily, explicitly humorous, or silly.

The best way to make the most serious point in the world is to be as unserious as possible.

Disappointment is an endless wellspring of comedy inspiration.

There's something that's really fun about the challenge of making the mundane funny, too, I think.

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

Humor and seriousness are not in opposition to each other.

I try to find humor in everything I do, because I think all great plays - even great tragedies - have enormous humor in them.

There is some humour in 'Family Values.' I don't want everyone to think it's not going to make them laugh. But there are quite a lot of poems there that aren't funny at all.

I always try to attack the most honest issues I can in my comedy.

Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor.

Comedy is tragedy - plus time.

I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.

I have to be entertained by what I'm writing, so a lot of my stuff has a goofiness or scatological quality. If these characters can entertain me, then I feel like I can deal with the darker or more serious stuff.

I use humour a lot. My foundation is tragic, but my appearance is humorous.

You can pretend to be serious; but you can't pretend to be witty.

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.

Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.

When people write comedy from neutrality, it just gets kind of silly.

Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can't know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.