Comedy

"Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations."

"A good comedian can say things funny and other guys just say funny things."

"I use humor as a way to cope with that and to let our community know that we’re not invisible, at least not to us."

"There was Mark, whom I frightened into disguising himself in a clown's suit, so that nobody might suspect him to be a maker of literature: indeed, I frightened him so that he hid away the greater part of what he had made until after he was dead, and I could not get at him. That was a disgusting trick to play on me, I consider."

"You gotta believe me, Mandy! The clowns are nothing but ultimate evil! They want to be the dominant species on the planet and they’ll destroy us all to make it happen! Destroy us all! Destroy us all!"

"Don't you love farce? My fault I fear. I thought that you'd want what I want. Sorry, my dear. But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns. Don't bother, they're here."

"Isn't it rich? Are we a pair? Me here at last on the ground, You in mid-air. Send in the clowns."

"I don't want to be called "the greatest" or "one of the greatest". Let other guys claim to be the best. I just want to be known as a clown because to me, that's the height of my profession. It means you can do everything — sing, dance and, above all, make people laugh."

"Be a clown, be a clown, All the world loves a clown. Act the fool, play the calf, And you'll always have the last laugh."

"A clown's makeup and character, that's all he has to sell. He loves and believes in that character."

"I'm a big goofball. In Australia we call it a dag. … It's quite an affectionate term, but it means your basically a big goofball. I just love making a fool out of myself. I made my living as a clown at kids' parties for about three years."

"You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple."

"Though the clown is often deadpan, he is a connoisseur of laughter."

"CIRCA aims to make clowning dangerous again, to bring it back to the street, restore its disobedience and give it back the social function it once had: its ability to disrupt, critique and heal society. Since the beginning of time tricksters (the mythological origin or all clowns) have embraced life's paradoxes, creating coherence through confusion — adding disorder to the world in order to expose its lies and speak the truth."

"The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army is looking for fools and rebels, radicals and rascals, tricksters and traitors, mutineers and malcontents to join its ranks. You could be part of a fighting force armed with ruthless love and fully trained in the ancient art of clowning and non-violent direct action. You could learn ingeniously stupid tactics that baffle the powerful. You could uncover your inner clown and discover the subversive freedom of fooling. You don't need to like clowns or soldiers, you just need to love life and laughter as much as rebellion."

"I remain just one thing, and one thing only — and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician."

"Take a look at those clowns And the tricks that they play In the circus of life Life is bitter and gay'There are clowns in the night Clowns everywhere See how they run Run from despair …"

"With both lined up four abreast, she read me the cards. Poor drunkard of the tale. Two fortune-tellers dead. And a room full of bottles. The clown is drunk. And the cards of death wait on him. His snout is blue, and he looks like a bear. And the rag doll of death, with the clown flinging him by the arm, can't be loved by you, madness. Because he is drunk and has no river, or breakdown. Because they cork him in, unable to love him. Because stars no longer love him."

"People hunger for love, and clowning is a trick to get love close. As a clown I can do things that people are too frightened of Love to allow you to do."

"[Francisco at his post. Enter to him Bernardo.] Bernardo: Who's there? Francisco: Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself."

"The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world."

"When I was in my teens, I invented a term to describe them. I call it 'holiday consciousness' . . . because I often experienced this sense of optimism and wide-awakeness when setting out on a journey or a holiday. It was always the feeling that the world is self-evidently complex and beautiful, and that life is so obviously good that man's boredom and defeat is an absurdity . . . And then I used to ask: Why do men forget this so easily? And the answer seemed obvious: because the human will is so flabby and weak. Instead of being self-controlled, self-driven creatures, most men are little more than leaves on a stream, they drift along hoping for the best. I once wrote that men are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings."

"The more absurd life is, the more unsupportable death is."

"Jesus never said anything about absurdity, and he never indicated for one flash of time that he was aware of the preposterousness of his theory about himself. And he didn't even try to make the theory understandable in terms of the reality and experience of the rest of us. For if everybody else is also not what Jesus said he was, what good is what he said?"

"The logical figure of the absurd, which presents as stringent the contradictory opposite of stringency, negates all the meaningfulness logic seems to provide in order to convict logic of its own absurdity: to convict it of using subject, predicate, and copula to lay out the nonidentical as though it were identical, as though it could be accommodated with forms."

"I very much like your love of pleasure, and your humour and malice: it is so delightful to live in a world that is full of pictures, and incident divertissements, and amiable absurdities. Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together."

"From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step."

"A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity; it is an occupational risk."

"We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art."

"The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject but man only."

"Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity."

"There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world."

"Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it or simply avoid it."

"Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the talisman of liberty."

"There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light."

"In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask."

"It is not funny that anything else should fall down, only that a man should fall down … Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified."

"Absurdity, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion."

"Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful."

"The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it."