Tragic Comedy Quotes

There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.

Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy.

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.

A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.

My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.

Life can be very funny and very tragic. Everyone has stuff that they've been through that makes up whatever fire it is that they have in their gut, but nobody goes around wearing that as their outmost exterior, all the time.

My favourite kind of comedy comes from the awkwardness of living, the stuff that makes you cringe but borders on tragic - that is more interesting to me. It resonates; it comes from emotional truth.

The life of every individual is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy.

Life is dramatic and comedic at times. Sometimes in the most dramatic situations, there is comedy. And good comedy comes from a sense of reality.

It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical

I would love to do a film with a lot of humor in it: a comedy with pain instead of a painful film with some comedy.

Humanity is a comic role.

Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor.

Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

My thing was always more character-driven comedies, not sketch comedy - not that there's not room for both or one isn't enjoyable, just my personal taste, I like movies that comedy comes from out of flaws of people, things that are uncomfortable, out of tragedy.

A big part of the humor is in identifying with the tragic elements of the film. The New Zealand sense of humor is very dark. Our films are usually very dark and it's always someone being killed. Usually a child.

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.

In life, comedy occurs naturally, as it should, in the most appalling of circumstances.

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.

Comedy tends to come out of things which are quite painful and serious.

My mother used to push 'Wuthering Heights' on me as a boy, and I sensed from her breathy description of the story that it would make me laugh. I have no plans to find out if this is true.

Well, for me, it's the relationship between comedy and life - that's the edge I live on, and maybe it's my protection against looking at the tragedy of it all. It's seeing life in balance. Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can't have one without the other. I'm of the school that anything can be funny, if seen from a comedic point of view.

One can always lament, you know — but to laugh in the face of life, that's very hard. And for me the great tragedian should also be a great comedian.