Max Hastings Quotes

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

Rob and I both have this strange sense of comedy which always involves us being the butt of our own jokes.

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

I've always loved pure, silly slapstick comedy. It always makes me laugh.

Optimism isn't funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. It's exaggeration.

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

It's almost impossible to be funnier than the people in Washington.

When you take a character seriously, there's more room for comedy because you're not aware of how absurd you are.

By the very nature of satire or parody, you have to love and respect your target and respect it enough to understand every aspect of it, so you can more effectively make fun of it.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

The best jokes resonate because they uncover ridiculousness in our daily lives, reveal the silliness - and sometimes sadness - of things we see every day.

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.

Like I said, all comedy is based on exaggeration, big or small, whatever you can get away with.

As you know it is a comedy so everything is a little bit pushed. That's what's funny about this kind of movie is you can laugh about the absurdity, and the bad side of life.

Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.

A farce, or slapstick humor, does well universally.

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

Farce treats the improbable as probable, the impossible as possible.

Madness isn't altogether a bad thing in comedy.

There's nothing funnier than the human animal.

I'm ridiculous, I'm ludicrous.

I think things are funny when the character is taking it totally seriously.

I think God has a tremendous sense of humor.