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. . . see: "HUMOR" for related links Tragedy and comedy are but two aspects of what is real, and whether we see the tragic or the humorous is a matter of perspective. --Arnold Beisser (1925—1991) American doctor and Gestalt therapist. _Flying Without Wings: Personal Reflections on Being Disabled_ [1987] Tragedy is if I get a paper cut. . . . Comedy is if you fall into an open sewer and die. --Mel Brooks (b. 1926) American actor, writer, and director. Quoted in "New Orleans Times-Picayune" [28 March 2002]. Comedy is tragedy plus time. --Carol Burnett (b. 1934) American television actress. Quoted in "Television Quarterly" [1970]. - All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl. --Charlie Chaplin (1889—1977) English film actor and director. _My Autobiography_, ch. 10 [1964] Charlie Chaplin (1889—1977) English film actor and director. (The playwright Charles MacArthur had been brought to Hollywood to do a screenplay, but was finding it difficult to do visual jokes.) 'What's the problem?' asked Chaplin. 'How, for example, could I make a fat lady walking down Fifth Avenue, slip on a banana peel and still get a laugh. It's been done a million times,' said MacArthur. 'What's the best way to *get* the laugh? Do I show first the banana peel, then the fat lady approaching: then she slips? Or do I show the fat lady first, then the banana peel, and *then* she slips?' 'Neither,' said Chaplin without a moment's hesitation. 'You show the fat lady approaching; then you show the banana peel; then you show the fat lady and the banana peel together; then she steps *over* the banana peel and disappears down a manhole.' --_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_ edited by Clifton Fadiman and André Bernard [2000 ed.] - - At age 87, the woman who for almost five decades kept them laughing — “You know you’re getting old when your blood type’s been discontinued” — has earned the right to keep them waiting. “Oh, that man is so stupid,” went one early bit. “He was stranded for six hours on an escalator when the power failed.” “I do dinner in three phases. Serve the food, clear the table, bury the dead” --Phyllis Diller (b. 1917) American comedian. Quoted in "Phyllis Diller: Live and at Home" by Joanne Kaufman _Wall Street Journal_ [5 August 2005]. - The first thing any comedian does on getting an unscheduled laugh is to verify the state of his buttons. --W. C. Fields [William Claude Dukenfield] (1880—1946) American vaudeville star and film actor. Quoted by Robert L. Taylor "W. C. Fields, Rowdy King of Comedy" in _Saturday Evening Post_ [1949]. It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously. --Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British comedian. _Paperweight_ [1992], as quoted in Ned Sherrin _Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations_ [2008]. [Replying on his deathbed to George Seaton's remark, 'I guess dying can be very hard':] Yes, but not as hard as playing comedy! --Edmund Gwenn (1875—1959) English actor. Quoted in Don Widener _Lemmon: A Biography_ [1975]. The more one suffers, the more, I believe, one has a sense of the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires the authority in the art of the comic. --Sören Kierkegaard (1813—1855) Danish philosopher. _Stages On Life's Way_ [1845] The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth. --George Jean Nathan (1882—1958) American drama critic and editor. "American Mercury" [September 1929] The difference between my generation and the current comics is that comedy was always at our expense. Now it's at somebody else's. --Eric Stykes (b. 1923) British comedic writer and actor. In "Independent" [31 October 1998]. [While Edgar Bergen and his puppet Charlie McCarthy were taping a skit for the television program "Laugh In"] part of the set fell down behind him. . . . Bergen was so cool, he didn't even turn around to see what had happened. But *Charlie* did turn around. What a genius! --Lily Tomlin (b. 1939) American actress and comedian. "San Francisco Chronicle" [26 July 1996] The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel. --Horace Walpole (1717—1797) English writer and connoisseur. _Letters_ "To the Countess of Upper Ossory" [16 August 1776] - [On "genius" in comedy:] Even Harold Lloyd, whose final clock-clinging minutes of "Safety Last" [1923] are the most audaciously funny on film, does not make Woody Allen's All-Star team: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, Groucho and Harpo Marx and Peter Sellers. Mr. Allen had included Mae West, but called the next day and busted her down to "an enormously gifted performer like Bob Hope and Jack Benny, but not a genius," --Interview with Woody Allen [Allen Stewart Konigsberg] (b. 1935) by Franz Lidz and Steve Rushin in "New York Times" [30 January 2000]. - ...the modern comics are just... well.... sharper edges without sharper wit. --Ann, alt.fiftyplus (Usenet newsgroup) - Woody Allen — when he shot the moose, but the bullet just creased his scalp — so the moose wakes up as he's driving home: "... and there's a law in New York State against driving with a conscious moose on your fender, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, and I'm very panicky, then, it hits me. Some of my friends are having a costume party. I'll go, I'll take the moose, I'll ditch him at the party — it wouldn't be my responsibility." So, he does, and the moose is a great success except when the time comes to judge the best costume: "First prize goes to the Berkowitzes, a married couple dressed as a moose. The moose comes in second. The moose is furious! He and the Berkowitzes lock horns in the living room. They knock each other unconscious. Now, I figure, here's my chance. I grab the moose, strap him on my fender, shoot back to the woods. But! I've got the Berkowitzes..." --- Wody Allen's "Examining Psychic Phenomena" in _New Yorker_ [1973]: The most astonishing case of transsubstantiation was that of Sir Arthur Murray who vanished with an audible pop while he was taking a bath and suddenly appeared in the string section of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. He stayed on as first violinist for twenty-seven years, although he could only play 'Three Blind Mice', and vanished abruptly one day during Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, turning up in bed with Winston Churchill. -- George & Gracie: [George Burns (1896-1996), Gracie Allen (1895-1964) George: Gracie, this family of yours.... Gr: When Willie was a little baby my father took him riding in his carriage, and two hours later my father came back with a different baby and a different carriage. George: Well, what did your mother say? Gr: My mother didn't say anything because it was a better carriage. George: A better carriage? Gr: Yes....and the little baby my father brought home was a little French baby so my mother took up French. George: Why? Gr: So she would be able to understand the baby... George: ...when the baby started to talk. Gr: Yeah. -- In a series named 'The Frost Report', John Cleese was recruited to write and perform. His height and manner were used to great effect in a sketch by John Law and Marty Feldman on class distinction. The point was rammed home by the fact that John Cleese, at six foot five inches, towered over Ronnie Barker's five foot nine inches, and Ronnie Corbett's five foot one inch. Cleese: I look down on him (indicating Barker) because I am upper class. Barker: I look up to him (indicating Cleese) because he is upper class, but I look down on him (indicating Corbett) because he is lower class. I am middle class. Corbett: I know my place. I look up to them both. But I don't look up to him (Barker) as much as I look up to him (Cleese), because he has got innate breeding. Cleese: I have got innate breeding, but I have not got any money. So sometimes I look up (bending knees and doing so) to him (Barker). Barker: I still look up to him (Cleese) because although I have money, I am vulgar. But I am not as vulgar as him (Corbett), so I still look down on him (Corbett). Corbett: I know my place. I look up to them both; but while I am poor, I am honest, industrious and trustworthy. Had I the inclination, I could look down on them. But I don't. Barker: We all know our place, but what do we get out of it? Cleese: I get a feeling of superiority over them. Barker: I get a feeling of inferiority from him (Cleese) but a feeling of superiority over him (Corbett). Corbett: I get a pain in the back of my neck. --- Here's another piece of Cleese/Graham Chapman writing: Chapman: Hullo, Mrs Premise. Cleese: Hullo, Mrs Conclusion. Chapman: Busy day? Cleese: Busy? I just spent four hours burying the cat. Chapman: Four hours to bury a cat? Cleese: Yes — it wouldn't keep still. Chapman: Oh — it wasn't dead, then? Cleese: No, no — but it's not at all well, so as we were going away for a fortnight's holiday I thought I'd better bury it to be on the safe side. Chapman: Quite right — you don't want to come back from Sorrento to a dead cat. It'd be so anticlimatic. Yes, kill it now, that's what I say. We're going to have our budgie put down. Cleese: Really — is it very old? Chapman: No, we just don't like it. We're going to take it to the vet tomorrow. Tell me, how do they put budgies down, then? Chapman: Well, it's funny you should ask that, because I've just been reading a great big book about how to put your budgie down, and apparently, you can either hit them with the book ........ --written and acted by Graham Chapman and John Cleese, "Monty Python's Flying Circus" [TV Show, Episode 27] end page | CALAMITIES - CALM | CALUMNY - CANADA | CANCER - CAPITAL PUNISHMENT | CAPITALISM | CAREFREE - CARPE DIEM | CARTER (JIMMY) - CATS & DOGS | CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES - CENSORSHIP | CERTAINTY - CHANGE | CHANGING (ONE'S MIND) & CHANGING TIMES | CHARACTER | CHARACTER ASSASINATION - CHEERFULNESS | CHEER UP! - CHILDHOOD | CHILDREN | CHILDREN'S RHYME | CHINA | CHOCOLATE - CHRISTIANITY | CHRISTMAS | CHURCH - CIGARS | CIRCUMSTANCES & CITIES | CIVILITY - CIVIL RIGHTS | CLARITY - CLEVER | CLOTHES - COFFEE | COLD - COLORS | COMEDY | COMFORT - COMMON SENSE | COMMUNICATION | COMMUNISM | COMPANIONSHIP - COMPASSION | COMPETITION - COMPLIMENTS | COMPOSERS - CONDUCTORS | CONFESSION - CONQUEST | CONSCIENCE - CONTENTED | CONTEXT - CONVERSATION | CONVICTION & COOKING | COOLIDGE - CORPORATIONS | CORRUPTION - COURAGE | COURT - COWS | CREATIVITY - CRIME | CRIME & PUNISHMENT - CROOKS | CRITICISM & CRITICS | CROWD (THE) - CUBA | CULTURE - CYNICS | | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The Reviews | |
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