Comic Irony Quotes

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

The fine line between roaring with laughter and crying because it's a disaster is a very, very fine line. You see a chap slip on a banana skin in the street and you roar with laughter when he falls slap on his backside. If in doing so you suddenly see he's broken a leg, you very quickly stop laughing and it's not a joke anymore.

People like Bill Murray are incredible at what they do and are definitely my flavour. Although Will Ferrell, Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais are also incredible actors. In their comedy, they make these stupid people feel so real. These guys are really setting the bar very high, and I learn as much from them about acting as I do about comedy.

We're taking part in a divine comedy and we should realise that the play is always a comedy, in that we're all ultimately ridiculous.

Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.

I love Sam Neill. The thing that I always say about him, and I think it's true, is he's so dry. When he's serious, I think he's joking; when he's joking, I think he's serious.

I think the best comedy is tragicomic. Yeah, I suppose if you were to look at everything I've done, there is a bit of a black streak through all of it. It's not deliberate: it's what makes me laugh, and there's a fine tradition of it, especially in Ireland.

Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

In my standup work, I always do these characters, older people who are just off to the side. It's easier to write a story about the guy who made it to the top, but the middle is so much more interesting, so much more murky.

A passport picture is a photo of a man that he can laugh at without realizing that it looks exactly the way his friends see him.

I think we all love to watch something we know is going to go catastrophically wrong - the old banana skin syndrome, which is particular to the British sense of humour.

I like to watch and perform the kind of comedy that comes out of the situation - where the character is really serious and in a tough situation and doesn't realize that the situation is comic.

It is really funny when people say you'd be obvious for a great villain.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.