Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.
Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.
I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.
There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.
Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.
I've always been attracted to more intense and darker roles, but I think there is complexity and darkness in comedies as well.
But our comedies never endured long without a tragedy.
Any film which views the darker side of life, which is death with a sense of humor, is very much to my taste.
I've played Beckett. I put on in the 1950s the first Australian production of 'Waiting for Godot.' I played Estragon. The most interesting conversation I've had about Beckett was with a Dublin taxi driver.
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.
Whether it's Shakespeare or Moliere, irony is a key component in the construction of theatre. A script would be pretty bad if it was devoid of irony.
When I was a playwright earlier in my career - my senior project in high school was my first produced play - I used to put on the title page: 'A tragedy with laughs.'
I take the most wrenchingly painful moments of my life, brush them off and present them for the amusement of others. Luckily for me, my childhood was torture.
My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.
I loved doing Shakespeare. My two favorite roles, in fact, have been Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
'Collaborator' is a hostage tragicomedy, but it's also, kind of, everything I know about post-war America. Well, not everything, but it does reference a lot of the post-war period.
There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.
It's my job to be the Pierrot, the clown, in the theatrical sense.
I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.
Unfortunately, I was making comedies in my 20s, but other people didn't realize they were comedies.
Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.
I am billed as a humorist, but of course I am a tragedian at heart.
I'd have to say that my favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning. 'Little Miss Sunshine' is like that. That's my fave genre, if I had to pick one.
Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it.
So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.
