Comedy Tragedy Quotes & Sayings

Mankind is immortal
in the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of nature
but by virtue of man's subjection to it. The "fall" in tragedy ends in
death; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where, by natures's arithmetic,
one and one make a brand new one. — Rose A. Zimbardo

Mothers and daughters
it's a comedy, but also a tragedy. We fill our daughters with all the chutzpah we wish for ourselves. We want them to be free as we were not. And then we resent them for being so free. We resent them for being what we have made! With granddaughters, it's so much easier. And great-granddaughters. — Erica Jong

Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in the silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have. — Frederick Buechner

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

If I got a paper cut, that's a tragedy. If you fell down an open manhole and died, that's comedy. — Woody Allen

You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. — Robyn Schneider

The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this? — Virginia Woolf

You can always turn a tragedy into a comedy by sitting down. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Comedy and tragedy are basically the same thing. Comedy is just the art of making light of life's sufferings. Turning all your pain into a joke. — Katie Kacvinsky

Maybe he was a softy, but that was okay. Being hardened by this world, I figured, was a true tragedy, and Lincoln didn't belong in a tragedy. A comedy of errors, possibly, but not a tragedy. For as long as I was in his life, I wouldn't let that be the outcome. — Megan Squires

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. — George Bernard Shaw

Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you're seeing. — Lauren Groff

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people. — Angela Carter

I was transfixed by the possibility of imagination within this home, no matter how strange it appeared to be. This wasn't the quiet symmetry of my everyday, the rows of terraced houses with their rectangular gardens and the routines as reliable as sturdy hairs. This wasn't the world in which things matched, or even went with. This was a world devoid of harmony. This was a world of drama, where comedy and tragedy fought for space. — Sarah Winman

I come from a very expressive family, so it's really not surprising that we became actors. There was a lot of real-life drama in our house. Some of it was drama, some of it was comedy and some of it was comic-tragedy. — John Turturro

Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. — Jean Racine

It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves. — Arthur Conan Doyle

On the contrary, as Miller also notes, "Tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and ... its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal." For the tragic view indicates that we take seriously man's freedom and his need to realize himself; it demonstrates our belief in the "indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity. — Rollo May

Tragedy is an unfinished comedy. — Joseph Campbell

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look. — Aldous Huxley

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy. — John Guare

In the midst of tragedy we start the comedy. — Agatha Christie

What is the world? What is it for?
It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched.
Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe. — N.D. Wilson

Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more. — Jeannette Walls

The institutions at the centre of capitalism are bigger than they've ever been, the pay is much greater, the ability of society to get its arms around it is much less. The political clout of the financial class is unbelievable. I'd say the story is darker than when I was there. When I was there it felt like a comedy - and now it feels more like a tragedy. — Michael Lewis

Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune — Susanne Katherina Langer

I seek to sensitize and clarify the essential elements of my soul. I will leave striving for the flags of fame and fortune behind and go where the soul beckons without fearing the decisive outcome. I will travel in a world without boundaries and embrace danger and awe. I will stand as a witness to comedy, beauty, and tragedy and apply the principles of artistic and ascetic forms of awareness to overcome the inherent frustration of enduring a fundamentally painful human existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Tragedy is actually untimely comedy — Adhish Mazumder

I have remained true to my deepest convictions. I mean the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy - for otherwise how can we manage to bear it? — Penelope Fitzgerald

The stories teach them valuable life lessons. That good things happen to bad people. That it's possible to make a bad situation even worse if you don't think it through. That parents are clueless except when they're not. That it's good to try new things even when a new thing is kind of disgusting, because new experiences make you a well-rounded person. That art can be transcendent. That lust is all-powerful, that drugs are fun, and that not everyone who does them is a loser. That losing people is part of life. That where comedy goes, tragedy isn't far behind. That everyone has issues with their bodies, but some take it too far, almost to death. That fear can be exhilarating. That boys are assholes. That it's important to look forward and never look back ... — Megan McCafferty

Comedy is tragedy revisited. — Phyllis Diller

There is something of tragedy and a 'comedy of eternal errors' when we attempt to write great scripts of rescue when we are the ones in need of rescue. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. — Horace Walpole

It was always a delicate balance, life and death, comedy and tragedy. — Chris Kyle

An actor must communicate his author's given message
comedy, tragedy, serio- comedy; then comes his unique moment, as he is confronted by the looked-for, yet at times unexpected, reaction of the audience. This split second is his; he is in command of his medium; the effect vanishes into thin air; but that moment has a power all its own and, like power in any form, is stimulating and alluring. — Eleanor Robson Belmont

I never get tired of looking at her [Catherine Keener] and it always surprises me, despite how many hours of film I've shot on that face. She's fantastic. She does comedy and tragedy so equally well. She wears her feeling so on the surface for both. I try to stop myself from casting her but I just keep coming back to her. She's just so fantastic to work with. — Nicole Holofcener

Optimist: someone who isn't sure whether life is a tragedy or a comedy but is tickled silly just to be in the play. — Robert Breault

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred. — Pico Iyer

Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens. — Frederick Buechner

It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen. — Philip K. Dick

Vegas means comedy, tragedy, happiness and sadness all at the same time. — Artie Lange

Get up every day and consider the stage you're on. Only you can decide whether it will be a tragedy, a comedy or a drama. — Maryln Schwartz

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations. — Horace Walpole

The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man. — G.K. Chesterton

Human comedy is more profound than tragedy. In tragedy we die and it is very sad. In comedy we avoid death, and it is even sadder. — Jennifer Stone

The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. — Joseph Campbell

I just think it's fortunate that Sir Isaac Newton didn't share the sense of humor of a member of the public, because had he done so, he would of been so amused by the simple effects of gravity, that he would of never gotten round making a comprehensive study of it's causes.
That's the punchline! 'a comprehensive study of it's courses'! I worked for that! Will you be telling this joke at work? I don't think so!
And yes, I am aware that I say this to you while hanging precariously of this art-deco balcony. And I do so deliberately in the hope that I will fall to my death, and that you will learn about the thin line between slap-stick and tragedy. — Stewart Lee

The constituents of tragedy may be universally acknowledged, easily invoked and deeply felt, but the elements of comedy are, I think, more widely variable from person to person. — Paul Di Filippo

Comedy = tragedy + time. — Carol Burnett

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

Comedy is merely tragedy happening to someone else. — W.C. Fields

My own inclination is to skew towards humor. They say that some people view life as a comedy, others as a tragedy. Me? Comedy all the way. — Lauren Willig

The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life's singularity - the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance. — John Updike

The Gold Rush(1925) affirmed Charlie Chaplin's belief that tragedy and comedy are never far apart. — Steven Jay Schneider

Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis. — Subcomandante Marcos Laura Castellanos

The script for 'Infamous' was so poised between tragedy and comedy. It's a dream part. One reads those scripts with a sense of melancholia. When you read a script that good ... I remember thinking, 'Oh, this script is too good. They'll never give it to me.' — Toby Jones

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it. — Lenny Bruce

Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding. — Robyn Schneider

I am very interested in that fine line between fiction and reality and between comedy and tragedy - and pushing the line as much as possible. — Jill McCorkle

Life is a double-faced creature; one face is tragedy, the other one is comedy. We have no way but to face the first face with dignity! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I watched 60 Minutes ... and they showed this woman, she's in every kind of..thing like that. 'This woman', they say, 'she lost her first four children
died from malnutrition
and, now, she's afraid that her new six-month-old newborn twins will suffer the same fate' ... Who's going to step in and say ... 'kick her in the cunt 'til it doesn't work', 'that woman is a sociopath! that is a sick human being!' ... How much of a sociopath do you need to be? That is the slow ritual torture-murder of children, one after another! At what point does cause-and-effect not kick in? How many bulb-headed skeletons have to go stiff in your arms?! ... 'what? this one's not working ... oh, well let's try again', one after another. At what point do you not go 'I think this is bad'? ... How many kids are you going to fuckin' kill, lady? ... If you impregnate someone under those conditions, they should abort the parents! that's sick! — Doug Stanhope

Laurence Olivier said in an interview once that when he plays a tragedy he always aims for the funny parts, and the other way around. Because in a comedy you look for what's serious. I think that's true. Sometimes things are really funny if you're absolutely earnest. If you're really serious, it's hilarious. — Christopher Walken

With a book - presuming it's a good book - you can depend upon an outcome that adheres to the necessities of drama. The question will be answered. It has to be. The answer may not be happy; we can't guarantee a comedy. Sometimes tragedy strikes. But there will be a conclusion. Of that we can be sure. That's the whole point of a book. But in real life, there is no guarantee that any question will ever be answered. Real life is messy because we don't know where it's going to go. — Garth Stein

There's comedy in tragedy, and tragedy in comedy. There's always light and dark in most jobs. Whether it's framed as a comedy, drama or tragedy, you try to mix it up within that. You can work on a comedy and it's not laugh-a-minute off set. You can work on a tragedy that's absolutely hilarious. — Harry Treadaway

No novel is anything, for the purposes either of comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds upon the pages. Let an author so tell his tale as to touch his reader's heart and draw his tears, and he has, so far, done his work well. Truth let there be, --truth of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and women. If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational. — Anthony Trollope

No," he said after a pause, "the true art of the gods is the comic. The comic is a condescension of the divine to the world of man; it is the sublime vision, which cannot be studied, but must ever be celestially granted. In the comic the gods see their own being reflected as in a mirror, and while the tragic poet is bound by strict laws, they will allow the comic artist a freedom as unlimited as their own. They do not even withhold their own existence from his sports. Jove may favor Lucianos of Samosata. As long as your mockery is in true godly taste you may mock at the gods and still remain a sound devotee. But in pitying, or condoling with your god, you deny and annihilate him, and such is the most horrible of atheisms. — Karen Blixen

[Shakespeare realized that] Women are able to understand themselves better on a personal level and survive in the world if they dress in men's clothing, thus living underground, safe (...). The presence of women disguising themselves as men dictates that the play be a comedy; women remaining in their frocks, a tragedy. In four great tragedies -Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear- almost all the women die (...).
How much the women have to adhere to the rules and regulations of their enviroment makes a large difference. Once Rosalind [disguised as a man in As You Like It] has run away from the court, she has no institutional structures to deal with. Ophelia [in her frocks] is surrounded tightly by institutional structures of family, court, and politics; only by going mad can be get out of it all. — Tina Packer

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? — John Updike

The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. — Arthur Schopenhauer

The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art. — Oscar Wilde

Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Life is a tragedy for those who feel ... but a comedy for those who think — Brenda Walpole

Today's tragedy in Paris reminds us very viscerally that it's a right that some people are inexplicably forced to die for. So it's very important tonight that I express that everybody who works at our comedy show, all of us are terribly sad for the families and people of France and anybody in the world tonight who now has to think twice before making a joke. It's not the way it's supposed to be. — Conan O'Brien

We all know what tragedy is. "Yes, I'd rather not have any more tragedy, please. I'll have comedy, please." Comedy, in the Greek sense, only means that it has a happy ending. — Eric Drooker

Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot. — Buster Keaton

Comedy is tragedy plus time, but the time is different for everybody. — Mike Birbiglia

There's no such thing as an uninteresting life, such a thing is an impossibility. Beneath the dullest exterior, there is a drama, a comedy, a tragedy. — Mark Twain

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment. — Susan Sontag

Comedy Born When Tragedy Happens :( — Navin M. Karmarkar

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

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

That perhaps is your task
to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way
that is what we look to you to do now. — Virginia Woolf

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. — William Hazlitt

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is. — Ellen Page

The preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both ... — Frederick Buechner

Why do we laugh at such terrible things? Because comedy is often the sarcastic realization of inescapable tragedy. — Bryant H. McGill

After an hour of gliding though the crowd and two glasses of tepid wine later, Penelope had reached the spiritual state of being merrily tipsy. It was that perfect state when everything starts looking wonderful and every tragedy turns into a comedy. — Anya Wylde

Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm. — Sarah Moss

There is a point in portraying surface vulgarity where tragedy and comedy are very close. — Barbara Stanwyck

Life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility. — Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

It's so laughable that it's somewhere beyond comedy and right into tragedy again. — Libba Bray

The energy in a comedy is very serious. Somebody said comedy is a tragedy plus time. When you have a tragedy, for example, like this, like, 'We're going to die,' and you have time, like, five hours to die, it becomes a comedy. — Javier Camara

There are a lot of questions I keep asking myself about why I do comedy. I guess I laugh to keep from crying. And I guess if you ever get me crying, I might not stop. This is the way I look at tragedy or else I'll cry. — Bob Newhart

Tragedy turns into comedy when you watch your own drama and realizing it as a mind-created fiction designed to create you a sense of identity. — Eckhart Tolle

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.
MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy. — Oscar Wilde

He thought of his own by-now legendary novel, American Disillusionment, that cyclone which, for years, had woven its erratic path across the flatlands of his imaginary life, always on the verge of grandeur or disintegration, picking up characters and plotlines like houses and livestock, tossing them aside and moving on. It had taken the form, at various times, of a bitter comedy, a stoical Hemingwayesque tragedy, a hard-nosed lesson in social anatomy like something by John O'Hara, a bare-knuckles urban Huckleberry Finn. It was the autobiography of a man who could not face himself, an elaborate system of evasion and lies unredeemed by the artistic virtue of self-betrayal — Michael Chabon

Chess is a game sufficiently rich in meaning that it is easily capable of containing elements of both tragedy and comedy. — Luke McShane

And by this very difference tragedy stands apart in relation to comedy, for the latter intends to imitate those who are worse, and the former better, than people are now. — Aristotle.

Life is replete with comedy, drama, horror, suspense, tragedy, romance, mystery, fantasy and a good dose of fiction. While at times the plot may seem to be lacking, the special effects alone are well worth the price of admission. — Derek R. Audette