Robin McLeavy Quotes

It's a wonderful thing to be able to make fun of yourself and to do it in a way that sort of preserves your dignity but, at the same time, lets you play the theater of the absurd.

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.

Comedy is created when someone is trying very earnestly to do what he feels is the right thing to do at that moment.

I think that a big part of comedy is being made fun of, and it is looking silly or looking stupid.

Humor is reason gone mad.

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

I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don't really need a distinction between them.

People... need a time to laugh. It's up to us to bonk ourselves on the head and slip on a banana peel so the average guy can say, 'I may be bad, honey, but I'm not as much of an idiot as that guy on the screen.'

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.

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'm just trying to portray what I find ironic or humorous.

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

If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.

I know the new comedy god is surrealism, but it doesn't touch my heart.

Everything I say is a joke. I am a joke myself.

The energy in a comedy is very serious. Somebody said comedy is a tragedy plus time. When you have a tragedy, for example, like this, like, 'We're going to die,' and you have time, like, five hours to die, it becomes a comedy.

At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.

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'm like a sight gag.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

With Portlandia, I don't think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We're okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.

I have always found humor in places where humor wasn't necessarily intended.

More eccentric characters can push pretty far, but if you stay on the side of reality, it's always funnier.

Madness isn't altogether a bad thing in comedy.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.