Quotes & Sayings About Black Comedy

When I first started comedy, me and my friends were kids. I claim - although I know that it's a spurious and probably untrue claim - that we were the first generation of kids to act black. — Moshe Kasher

Her occupation was the worst that anyone could think of. No guest in the park had to think of it because, unlike the wandering dwarf women, her job had no bearing on paper. — Pam Jones

Stanley Kubrick went with his gut feeling: he directed 'Dr. Strangelove' as a black comedy. The film is routinely described as a masterpiece. — Tim Cahill

I get that racism exists, but it's not a catalyst for my content. I don't need to talk about race to have material. My style of comedy is more self-deprecating. I think that makes me more relatable. When you deal with 'topics' - race, white versus black - you're not separating from the pack. You're doing what everybody else is doing. — Kevin Hart

Yeah, I love being famous. It's almost like being white, y'know? — Chris Rock

I was so drunk I couldn't tell a vagina from a bullet hole — Andres Aloi

My oldest brother used to take me to the theater. The first play he took me to see was 'Black Comedy,' then he took me to see 'Butley.' We'd see all these British plays. And 'Hello, Dolly,' with Pearl Bailey. I was unconsciously thinking, 'Gee, I would love to be able to do that.' — Nathan Lane

I love 'Monty Python,' 'Black Adder,' 'Fawlty Towers.' I'm a huge fan of British comedy. — Isla Fisher

Don't get mad, get everything. Ivana Trump — Jan Bryndza

What I've found in my career is that 70 to 75 percent of comics are nice and have some sense of social skills, but there are those who end up in comedy because they don't know how to socialize. I don't want to deal with that group. — Lewis Black

The fine line that you do when you do political comedy is, as long as you have that laugh, you're fine. — Lewis Black

I did this Super-8 film at art school called 'Tissues,' this black comedy about a family whose father has been arrested for child molestation. I was absolutely thrilled by every inch of it, and would throw my projector in the back of my car and show it to anybody who would watch it. — Jane Campion

People always say 'You do racial comedy.' And I don't, exactly. I do cultural comedy. Because race and culture are two different things. There's black people from America and then there's black people from Africa. Racially, they're the same; culturally, they're extremely different. — Russell Peters

What ignited the rocket that sent you up into the vast regions of comedy, and why? I would say, for me, that philosophical treatise about having black beginnings and wanting love to compensate for that, wanting audiences and wanting attention - I say, "Au contraire." Completely opposite. I want the continuation of my mother's incredible love and attention to me. — Mel Brooks

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. — Sharon Horgan

He quite liked dentists' waiting rooms. Waiting for dentists was good. Waiting for them was so much better than having them stick metal spikes in your mouth. — Jackson Radcliffe

How shall I typify what happened? Passion play? Somewhat. Weird tale? Indubitably. Horror story? Pretty close. Grotesque melodrama? Certainly. Black comedy? Your point of view will determine that. Perhaps it was a combination of them all ...
So, to the story. A chronicle of greed and cruelty, horror and rapacity, sadism and murder.
Love, American style. — Richard Matheson

Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material. — Rachel Cusk

Every Friday is black where I work. — The Covert Comic

When a musical act performs, the black audience goes crazy for all the stuff, the album cuts, everything. White audiences, they're nice and all, but they're not going to lose it until they get the hits. Comedy is the same thing. — Chris Rock

When Kubrick decided to go the black comedy route with his movie, he thought of me to give it that flavor. — Terry Southern

I don't watch that much comedy. I think it's professional jealousy. That and a lack of support for my community. — Michael Ian Black

A nation not of men but of laws, intoned John Adams as he, among other lawyers, launched what has easily become the most demented society ever consciously devised by intelligent men. We are now enslaves by laws. We are governed by lawyers. We create little but litigate much. Our monuments are the ever-expanding prisons, where millions languish for having committed victimless crimes or for simply not playing the game of plausible deniability (aka lying) with a sufficiently good legal team. What began as a sort of Restoration comedy, The Impeachment of a President, on a frivolous, irrelevant matter, is suddenly turning very black indeed, and all our political arrangements are at risk as superstitious Christian fundamentalists and their corporate manipulators seem intent on overthrowing two presidential elections in a Senate trial. This is no longer comedy. This is usurpation. — Gore Vidal

Social media is basically standing at a bucket filled with other people's vomit and you suck the vomit through a straw, and gag and wince at the unbearable taste of other people's vomit. Yet strangely we continue to suck through the straw as if we've never tasted such lovely vomit. And then before you know it you're old and you're grey. And that's the end of you. A lonely death. Your gravestone is marked with the six saddest words:

Social Media Drained My Soul Away

And they all mourn your loss at a budget funeral service while updating their social media statuses on mobile phones apps. And in years to come nobody remembers any of your updates; even those updates that you deep-down believed were going to bring about world peace. The Digital Age is more disposable than nappies and just as full of shit. — Rupert Dreyfus

I thought I'd be living a much more bohemian life and be very poor. I never thought I'd do comedy or be married living in the suburbs. Every time I try to plan my life out it just doesn't come to pass, and I think that's a great experience. — Michael Ian Black

As I sorted through my confusion, I started to get mad. More and more, this had turned into one grotesque comedy of mishaps, and I didn't think it was funny. How much did the rat know? And while we're at it, hot much did the man in the black suit know? Here I was, smack in the center of everything without a clue. At every turn, I'd been off base, way off the mark. Of course, you can say the same about my whole life. In that sense, I suppose I had no one to blame. All the same, what gave them the right ti treat me like this? I'd been used, I'd been beaten, I'd been wrung dry. — Haruki Murakami

My school was 90 percent white, but 90 percent of the kids I played with were black. So I got the best of both worlds. I think that is where my comedy developed. — Will Smith

I'm a black male, over 40, with no kids, living in the suburbs - they wanted to put me in a museum. Why did I move to the suburbs? I started watching Desperate Housewives. If comedy didn't work out I can always try gardening. — Alonzo Bodden

All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy. — Martin McDonagh

I guess, in a way, I grew up mixed race: half white, half black. That question's always been on my mind: 'What are you? Are you this or that? Are you a white dude or are you a black dude?' In a strange way, music and comedy is kind of the same thing. I'm both. They're just different modes of expression. — Reggie Watts

I can pretty much guarantee that if I do a show in a comedy club, there will be someone who will come out of the audience and tell me the worst joke ever. It's just a guarantee. — Lewis Black

When you see a culture where the intellectual architects of the invasion are not shamed for their behavior but rewarded within the mainstream media culture, black comedy, satire, absurdism is the only response. — John Cusack

European fascism changed comedy in America. Jack Benny explained, 'During World War II, attitudes changed. Hitler's ideology of Aryan supremacy put all ethnic humor in a bad light. When the black man's fight for equal rights and fair play became an issue after the War, I would no longer allow Rochester to say or do anything that an audience would consider degrading.' Benny's attitude toward race relations was enlightened. Starting in 1940 he refused to play any segregated venue. In the 1960s when his agent scheduled a world tour, Benny chastised him for booking a gig in apartheid South Africa and refused to appear. — Kliph Nesteroff

Lactose intolerant milk?! KISS, MY, DICK! — Lewis Black

He looks like a horse in a man costume! — Dylan Moran

I love America and I hate it. I'm torn between the two. I have two conflicting visions of America. One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy. — Bono

I think back to back romantic comedies are good for black film. — Taye Diggs

Phunny Business is a breezy, vivid, funny, star-studded and delightful valentine to comedy, entrepreneurship and the All-American impulse to make something out of nothing. The story of comedy club owner/inveterate dreamer Raymond Lambert and his heroic quest to create a safe, productive place for black stand-up comedians to hone their craft and find their voices isn't just a great Chicago story and a great comedy story: it's a flat-out great story, lovingly and engagingly told. — Nathan Rabin

In college I was one of six males who auditioned for five male roles in a comedy play. I was the one rejected. At that moment I made up my mind never to place myself at the mercy of some pompous, goateed, black-turtleneck-shirted "should I yay him or nay him?" pantywaist ever again. — Emo Philips

[On Dr. Strangelove]: My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. [...] What could be more absurd than the very idea of two mega powers willing to wipe out all human life because of an accident, spiced up by political differences that will seem as meaningless to people a hundred years from now as the theological conflicts of the Middle Ages appear to us today? — Stanley Kubrick

Yeah, even a black comedy. Where it's a little eerie. I'd love to do that. But there are about three really fabulous ones on the air now and I don't know if I can do any better than that. I'd like to sort of forge new ground. — Sharon Gless

I love comedy and drama equally and music too. I just sort of follow my nose to whatever seems really exciting at the time. Eventually, I might want to do a rock opera. — Jack Black

I work in comedy, journalism, media, and technology, many of which don't have a lot of black faces in visible positions. I walk through Brooklyn with a surfboard. It's fun to challenge and expand people's expectations. — Baratunde Thurston

A Murphy [Eddie Murphy] movie is like a Sidney Poitier comedy - he's that intensely good ... He revolutionized acting. He's literally black Brando. Before Eddie Murphy, there were two schools of acting for a black actor: Either you played it LIKE THIS or youplayeditlahkdis. He was the first black guy in a movie to talk like I am talking right now. That did not exist for black actors before him. — Scott Raab

The little woman, wearing a pink and black zigzag-striped pantsuit over a black turtleneck, resembled a skinny zebra who'd OD'd on Pepto-Bismol. — Vonnie Davis

In America now every romantic comedy is interpreted politically. I can remember when I was promoting Black Hawk Down we were all being asked what it said about September 11th. Well, it was shot before that happened, so, nothing. — Eric Bana

A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors. — Tom Stoppard

I never watched the Oscars. Come on, it's a fashion show ... What straight black man sits there and watches the Oscars? Show me one. And they don't recognize comedy, and you don't see a lot of black people nominated, so why should I watch it? — Chris Rock

The day of the wedding went like these things generally do, full of anxious moments interspersed with black comedy. — Janet Street-Porter

Black Mage: I was joking.
Red Mage: OH. See, I was confused by the total lack of comedy. — Brian Clevinger

Michael Jackson wanted to be in Men in Black II. He told me he had seen the first Men in Black in Paris and had stayed behind and sat there and wept. I had to explain to him that it was a comedy. — Barry Sonnenfeld

There are advances in technology and enabling voices, but there are issues with the stories themselves. I think people of color are still not seen as human beings. They're still associated with types, with comedy, but we're in a crisis right now, with things like Black Lives Matter. We need films that address these issues. — Charles Burnett

Ever since the romantic comedy-drama 'She's Gotta Have It' antagonized black women and black men in 1986, Spike Lee's films have enjoyed the outrage of various groups. — Lee Siegel

I do not need to hear people tearing into Lisa Lampanelli for liking to have sex only with black men. I'm sad that this is her famous running gag. I'm sad that I now know this. I'm sad that a legitimate rung on the ladder of making it in comedy is writing hateful stuff about total strangers. I don't know. — Mindy Kaling

Life is pure farce from beginning to end, with a little
black comedy thrown in for shade. If it was anything
else, mankind would have stuck his collective head in
the gas oyen years ago. No one could tolerate seventy
years of tragedy. When I die - probably of cancer -
Jane has prornised to put on my tombstone: "Here
lies Anne Cattrell who laughed her way through it.
The joke was on her but at least she knew it." (The Ice House) — Minette Walters

The most I can hope for is to die in a pose that confuses future archaeologists. — Yahtzee Croshaw

They're so broke that they've actually cut essential services. In many places, they've cut policemen, because, who the fuck needs them? Or firemen, son of a bitch, it's much more fun watching something burn down. — Lewis Black

Do you want to know why I don't like the so-called connoisseurs of arts? I hate hypocrisy. I'll give you an example: if the movie is colored and tells us about two friends who sit in the pool, fart into the water, get out of the pool and fart into each other's face it will be thrash, a lack of a culture and a third-rate comedy. But if the movie is black-and-white and tells us about two friends who cross the desert and peeing on each other, shit on the sand, and then they eat each other's shit, and on top of that they fucking each other's ass it will be a brilliant art house movie. — Ilze Falb

My career is a black comedy of sorts. I spent a lot of time explaining myself to various different groups. But more and more, I'm finding that the desire to communicate, which all these audiences share, is a powerful thing. — G. Willow Wilson

...Mrs. Percy understood that staying beautiful all day long is the most important aspect of being married... — Tevin Hansen

In black neighborhoods, everybody appreciated comedy about real life. In the white community, fantasy was funnier. I started looking for the jokes that were equally hilarious across the board, for totally different reasons. — Will Smith

From long experience in places like Afghanisatan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognised, in the black jihadist's movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr's heavens. — Neal Stephenson

They have what you call a black night where they have black people come in for just one night only to watch comedy, and you get all your local drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes, all of them come in, sit down, and listen to you tell jokes. They the hardest people to make laugh. — Mike Epps

I set out to do a horror film with 'Dog Soldiers,' and what I came out with at the end of the day was something that was more of a cult movie, more of a black comedy with some horror elements in it. It kind of went over the top. — Neil Marshall

On the day the park opened, half the state must have turned up. California weddings that June were small in attendance, the bride, groom, and guests quitting the ceremony for their cars after the second "I do"; especially hasty couples did away with the festivities altogether and simply took their vows en route to the park. — Pam Jones

I went to a public high school and most of the comedy was coming from the black kids and the Asian kids and the Hispanic kids. And, the coolest kids to me where always the black kids. They were always fashion forward and they always dressed the coolest. They were always the best dancers, and just the coolest people. — Brett Ratner

Black Comedy is a farce that is played in the dark, as you know, with the lights full on. It's the Chinese convention of reversing light and dark, and exactly where anybody is at any given moment is the play. — Peter Shaffer

My comedy has no color, it's for everybody, black, white, Latino, Asian. It's not a pro-black show, not a def jam show; it's just straight, wholesome type of humor. — Bruce Bruce

"Black culture" is ready for whatever. I sense some momentum and excitement around black artists (especially in comedy, which is where most of my own art resides), really pushing the bounds of what has generally been expected as black. I don't think it's a revolution so much as an exposure of what has always been there, and now that the production and distribution means are more accessible, people can more easily find each other. — Baratunde Thurston

Just relax and breathe through your ass. — Lewis Black

When I first started doing comedy, there was no such thing as a room that had black people and white people in it. That didn't exist. — Trevor Noah

There's no such thing as a limit on being the best. You can always go for more. That's what it means to be human. No... That's what it means to be me. - Claire Stanfield — Ryohgo Narita

There's something about courting the darkness that makes some people see the truth in raw, twisted ways, as though they were shining a black light on life to illuminate the absurdity of it all. Comics tell you a truth you can only see from the underside of the psyche. At its best, comedy is prophesy and societal dream interpretation. At its worst it's just dick jokes. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears! — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I'm not a child star, but you could say that I've grown up on TV. I went from being an unknown, down-and-out comic from Brooklyn and the Bronx to being a regular character on a major network comedy called 'Martin.' From there I went on to become the most notable black comic on 'Saturday Night Live' since Eddie Murphy. — Tracy Morgan

I've seen the end of the universe, and it happens to be in the United States and, oddly enough, it's in Houston, Texas. I know - I was shocked, too. Imagine my surprise when I left a comedy club one day and walked to the end of the block, and there on one corner was a Starbucks, and across the street from that Starbucks, in the exact same building as that Starbucks, there was - a Starbucks. I looked back and forth, thinking the sun was playing tricks with my eyes. That there was a Starbucks across from a Starbucks - and that, my friends, is the end of the universe. — Lewis Black

I ejaculated about ten minutes ago and the stuff was black. So everything is not normal.
Silence greeted that happy little announcement. Man, if he had hauled off and sucker-punched V, he would have gotten less of a shocked-out reaction. — J.R. Ward

Each of us is full of shit in our own special way. We are all shitty little snowflakes dancing in the universe. — Lewis Black

There's this misconception that comedy and music go together. They don't. Comedians can't compete with rock stars; they're just not on the same level. Rock stars will always be cooler. They will always get more girls. — Michael Ian Black

The colonel stood up. "I hope you enjoy your trip to Uruguay. Its government is stable, democratic, and politically mature. There's even a welfare state. Of course, the people are entirely European in origin. I believe they exterminated all the Indians. As a German, you should feel very much at home there. — Philip Kerr

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named "Bush", "Dick", and "Colin." Need I say more? — Chris Rock

Eddie [Murphy] is an icon. He's one of the reason why I started doing comedy in the beginning. He opened a lot of doors for black people. — Tracy Morgan

I don't know if you've noticed, but our two-party system is a bowl of shit looking at itself in the mirror. — Lewis Black