The great joy of doing 'The Daily Show' for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I'm playing the brown guy, and sometimes I'm not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.
Aasif Mandvi
That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.
Adlai Stevenson I
People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
Agnes Repplier
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
Albert Camus
Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood.
Alexander Herzen
Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.
Nothing is off-limits. There's just some things I cannot crack. Politics I can't do. When I start to talk about it, I just get really angry and super sincere. I have never found a way to craft all of that absurdity into funny.
Ali Wong
Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Ambrose Bierce
This Old Testament - containing error, folly, absurdity and immorality - is by English statute law declared to be of divine authority, a blasphemy - if there were anyone to be blasphemed - blacker and more insolent than any word ever written or penned by the most hotheaded Freethinker.
Annie Besant
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
Arthur Schopenhauer
There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
If you create a visual that actually captures the imagination, that's not real. It will look real, and that will spread at such lightning speed that by the time it's found out, it has already done its damage. It's a very, very scary time that we're living in. I say it's an age of absurdity.
Barry Levinson
No amount of manifest absurdity... could deter those who wanted to believe from believing.
Bernard Levin
Perceptions really do define what our realities are. What we're hoping to do with 'Atlanta' is to really shatter that. To shatter it completely wide open. To go from the furthest lane of absurdity to the furthest lane of reality and make them blend.
Brian Tyree Henry
Laughter is the best way to get over something or get closer to something. It's one of the things I respect most about Amy Schumer. She's found a way to get us closer to ourselves and see the ugly side of humanity, but not in a way that's pointing a finger or that's angry. She does it in a way that makes us see the absurdity and laugh at it.
Brie Larson
I think I was so grateful, in the years after Sleater-Kinney broke up or went on hiatus or whatever you want to call it, to find 'Portlandia' and co-create 'Portlandia' with Fred Armisen, which allows for levity, allows for the same kind of kinetic energy, but channeled through absurdity and surrealism.
Carrie Brownstein
The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out.
Charlie Pierce
I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.
Chester Himes
It's a wonderful narrative device to bring someone from the outside and look through his eyes if you want to describe the absurdity and preposterous reality that is accepted amongst the ones who are inside.
Christoph Waltz
We're going through a kind of ancient, barbaric war dance now - it's almost an ultimate in absurdity.
Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.
I love comedy. I love the absurdity of it. I love the kind of intelligence that's required to be dumb in comedy.
Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.
You tax Mexico? The president of the United States is going to tax Mexico to get a wall for the United States of America? I'm pointing out the absurdity of a lot of these comments.
Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.
Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there's humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.
The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.
What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it's better than anybody else's because it's yours. It's extremely provincial and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be, 'Don't read Shakespeare because he was white.'
When my father would come home from his work at the Senate and talk about the things he could talk about - because a lot of his work was top secret - he would always tell me these stories and laugh. As deadly serious as his work was, he would laugh at the absurdity of it all.
In France, where Franklin had lived from 1776 to 1785, he had won an extraordinary place in the public mind. The French had lionized him to the point of absurdity - or so at least his colleagues in the American mission thought.
It seems pretentious to assume that we are not creatures of action. I think often it takes a situation of extreme absurdity, extreme action, to push us to the limits of what our character is, and to change us as people.
The logical conclusion of relativism is absurdity. Non-sense. A worldview that undermines its own premises.
Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.
There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.
That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.
In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.
I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.
When I speak of drama, I'm really referring to just 'desperately trying not to be ordinary'. Trying to get something that has a little bit of friction, conflict, absurdity.
If you and I believe two different things, I can attack you verbally all day, but if I can make you laugh and show you the absurdity of your argument, it will lower you guard. People let you in then.
My first visit to West Berlin was in February 1983. The drive through East Berlin, the fact that West Berlin was surrounded by a wall that was more than 100 miles long - the absurdity and intensity of it really knocked me out.
To try to fix the future is a manifest absurdity.
I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film - anything - unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing.
A king without power is an absurdity.
I really enjoy playing that everyman part because that part is us, the audience. And you need somebody inside a comedy to tether the absurdity to reality.
I think being a writer is being heavily attuned to the absolute absurdity of things you take for granted, and I think that having actual parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution who are also interested in literature, they're also very attuned to those moments.
Dick Gregory will be greatly missed. Humbly, and in his stead, 'Turn Me Loose' carries on to be his voice and his inspiration for all who wish to laugh at the absurdity of racism and be enlightened by his spirit of justice.
If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.
All non-incumbent campaigns promise hope and change, but Obama took the promise to a new level of absurdity. He suggested that a vote for him would literally transform the Earth.
My brand of comedy is taking a serious approach to silliness. Small moments of modern life and human behavior make me laugh. At least that's where everything starts, and then my other through line would be a dry absurdity that exponentially spirals out of reality.
