Cecily von Ziegesar Quotes

The comics that are just conversing with you up there and drawing on their own life, yeah, I guess so. I guess some do political humor, some do topical humor, but the ones that I like, the ones that are appealing to me, were guys who were just talking to you about their life.

Primarily I'm a social commentator rather than someone who's out to get the belly laugh.

'South Park' is so hilarious... I remember when it first came out: that show changed television forever.

Comedy doesn't really matter that much; I know that. I treat it like an adult - I don't treat it like a child or a god, which some people do. This might just be in America, but 'stand-up comedy' is something very particular that I don't particularly relate to.

If you look at 'Network' or any kind of satire, it's fundamentally unemotional in some ways.

Everybody has their favorite character.That's the only way I pick, whatever is going on in society, whatever I think folks will laugh at that's what I come up with.

Mike Royce and I have always had success writing what we know. What we know now is that we're middle-aged, neurotic and fat.

Friendly satire may be compared to a fine lancet, which gently breathes a vein for health's sake.

Nothing's true that I say, because I don't really want to say anything. I don't think my life's that cool, and I don't think my opinion's that valid. They're just silly jokes. Usually I just take a topic that isn't funny at all, like Shakespeare, and work backwards. I just try to find an unfunny subject.

It really is great. Especially having people who we make fun every week come on and poke fun at themselves is really cool, I love that. No reality star has been mad at me yet for making fun of them. I'm sure that one day soon though, someone is going to take a swing at me.

The role of the comedian is to say 'Wait a minute' when a consensus starts to form.

If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.

Sometimes presenting the most ignorant point of view can be the best way to satirize the issue and highlight that ignorance.

Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.

Nobody and nothing beats The Simpsons. Even after all this time, it's still the best satire since Monty Python.

Fat is where comedy is stored.

Comedy distances pain, but leaves signs of it everywhere.

Comedy has a responsibility to be a voice of society, so within that, there's always going to be those that talk about those subjects and things that are going on in the world.

A long memory is the most subversive idea in America. A tautology is a thing which is tautological. A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people's attention. If your kids look like you, it's hereditory. If they look like the neighbor, it's the environment. Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.

Satire is meant to have teeth; satire is meant to be dangerous. But it also happens to be fun because subversion and telling the right kind of people to go to hell is supposed to feel good.

The end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction; and he who writes honestly is no more an enemy to the offender than the physician to the patient when he prescribes harsh remedies.

I'm delighted with it, because it used to be that films were the lowest form of art. Now we've got something to look down on.

Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.