Hannah Gadsby Quotes

I think comedy stems from being honest, often painfully so. I hope I can achieve that perspective in my own life and also have fun.

I think if you're trying to be funny, sometimes you're bending a piece of metal in a direction it doesn't want to go. And sometimes comedy just needs to find itself.

I'm a funny guy. I want people to laugh. I laugh at myself, I make fun of myself. But at the end of the day everything that I say has a message in it.

You have to be so honest in comedy.

You can be funny and say what you mean; these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Some of the best jokes came from people who meant it. See: Pryor, Bruce, Carlin, etc.

I think comedy has to come from a real place. It has to come from an honest place.

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not.

People often can't separate, or can't understand, that to be funny is to be serious; it's a way of pulling people in and not scaring them off. I think a lot of the funny stuff, underneath it, there's a deep anxiety going on.

One of the jobs of a stand-up comedienne is to expose hypocrisy.

I would make a few jabs at myself and go for the audience - they are still as flawed as ever.

The thing is, I was never really a comedian - a comedian would scoff at the notion of me as a comedian because I've never done anything, really. I've always just been some guy who's funny.

I love doing stand up. I think it's a really worthwhile art form. It's so unique in all the things it combines, in terms of it being philosophizing, preaching, speaking truth to power and basic communicating. It's a good way to talk back to the world.

What all my favorite comedians have in common is extraordinary honesty.

I write what I think is funny and I write from a sense of popping a balloon or a sense of injustice, whether it's about yourself, or whether it's about something else. It's my worldview; it doesn't mean that everybody has to agree with it.

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

Sometimes the best way to make 'em laugh is to show 'em how you honestly feel.

I was fooling everyone by surrounding myself with funny people. But then I put myself out there - writing my own sketches, going on stage with nobody surrounding me - and for some reason people were still laughing.

Comedy is all about having a point of view, and it's also about power.

I think I have always tried to connect my comedy to my art.

I think comedy I've learned is really just about relaxing and trusting yourself and allowing yourself to fail.

When I got on Stern I realized that this was the one job where you could be really honest and open, almost like Richard Pryor or something. You can be honest about your life and get laughs.

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

I'm quite an odd little part of the Venn diagram. I'm not a movie star and beautiful in that way. I do an odd thing that's funny and sad, and my face and my old body can take that.

I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.

I suppose I look for humor in most situations because it humanizes things; it makes a character much more three-dimensional if there's some kind of humor. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud type of stuff, just a sense that there is a humorous edge to things. I do like that.