Dan Levy Quotes

Mean comedy is not really something that I personally gravitate towards or something that I do.

I tend to like dry humor.

I'm not temperamentally into high comedy. I'm not a Noel Coward kind of girl.

I like humor: the sort of gentle humor that points out human foibles.

I really like just super dry comedy.

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.

You can laugh at somebody because they are innocent, and because they are naive or they are about to walk into a wall, but if somebody's giving you stuff, if somebody's talking, giving you their take on things, what makes you laugh, generally speaking, is going to be somebody who is telling it in an angry way.

I like that kind of 'straight-faced' comedy. I like to be straight-faced and outrageous.

A joke is a joke. There's an expression - I don't know if you have it - that's 'adding insult to injury.'

I think at its best the American sense of humor is the same as the British sense of humor at its best, which is to be wry and ironic and self deprecating.

I don't really like using ridicule as a form of humor.

I'm not really big on slapstick humor. I like gentle humor.

What is satire if not a marriage of civil disobedience to a laugh track, a potent brew of derision and lack of respect that acts as a nettle sting on the thin skin of the humourless?

I've done pretty well as a professional fed-up. The tools of my trade so far have been irony, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and supercilious contempt, but these are highly civilized weapons designed for 18th-century French salons.

Half-brights consider it comedy gold to congratulate anyone they dislike for 'winning the Kentucky Derby!' The only thing more bracingly original to not-smart people is: 'Stay classy!'

Satire is a weapon, and it can be quite cruel.

I don't resent at all people saying, 'Oh, he's like a sweetheart'... but within comedy, it's a very funny way to talk about someone because it usually means they don't have much of an act.

Comedy is based partly on mean-spiritedness.

Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions and the branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, teases, corrodes, undermines.

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.

Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin.

Satire or sense, alas! Can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

An insult is mean or unkind. Milton Berle called me the Sultan of Insult, and I was called the King of Insult. But the guy that gave me the best title - and I use it to this day - was Johnny Carson. He called me Mr. Warmth.

Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.

From my experience, politicians are much more uncomfortable being made fun of than they are being preached at and screeched at - you know, and the soapbox routine. They're much more uneasy knowing they're a target of ridicule.