A Quote by Michael Shurtleff

Humor is an attitude, a survivor’s way of looking at life. It’s not about telling jokes. — © Michael Shurtleff
Humor is an attitude, a survivor’s way of looking at life. It’s not about telling jokes.
Seinfeld has his way of telling jokes - and I'm not comparing myself to Seinfeld, his genius is observing the small details of everyday life and finding humor in it.
I love mixing humor and terror, or humor and exhaustion, or even humor and despair. I'm dealing right now with a loved one with cancer, and she's of course sad, but also telling the most disturbingly morbid jokes and puns. I love that, there's so much humanity in being able to mock fate and hardship.
The movie not only about what story you're telling and who you're looking at. It's mostly about how you're telling it and how you're looking at it. And people who don't like it, who say, "Oh, it's not 'true' because you're looking at it in a stylized way" - it's a movie and it's fiction, so it's also a lot in the artistic direction that it is political.
My attitude affects my actions. So, if I have a negative attitude about it, then it is going to show up in the way I respond, but if I have a positive attitude, then I start looking for the things I can do that will make my life better and make the lives of people around me better.
In a weird way, it's not different from any other kind of joke-telling. You make those calculations about jokes about celebrities: is this a fair hit or not? The stakes were higher because the whole world was crumbling around us, but in terms of joke-telling, it's all about feel.
The Australian sense of humor is very dry, sarcastic, and very undercover. Like if I tell any jokes in America, people just think I'm serious! So I just quit telling any jokes whatsoever.
I like telling stories with a sense of humor. But humor can also distance you from the subject you're writing about. I'm interested in using humor as a portal to something a bit more serious.
Sometimes when I try to make jokes or have a sense of humor in interviews, it doesn't go over very well. But Twitter made my life easier in this way that I didn't expect. It would have taken probably 10 times as long for people to accept my voice and my sense of humor if I didn't have Twitter.
I've never been able to tell jokes. In the beginning of my career I did impressions and jokes like any other comedian, but I was never very successful because I did it poorly. So I started to talk to the audience and started talking about the atmosphere around me and started to become angry, not in a mean-spirited way, but in a fun way - and my attitude developed from there.
Humor [in a scene] is not jokes. It is that attitude toward being alive without which you would long ago have jumped off the 59th Street Bridge.
Somebody who opposes Trump is wound so tight, they're not funny people anyway, that they don't get his humor. They really believe when he tells these jokes that that's dead serious stuff. There's not enough laughter on the left. Even their comedians are angry. Their comedians, the humor they shoot for is all personal put-down kind of humor where it used to not be that way. But Trump's humor, even the stuff that's not subtle, they miss, they take it literally and are frightened to death by it. It's incredible.
The jokes are great but what really matters for a comedian is his performance, his whole attitude, and the laughs that he gets between the jokes rather than on top of the jokes.
I like grown-up comedy, where it's about character and attitude and life as opposed to obvious gross-out and jokes.
I've dropped a lot of race humor from my routines, not because I think it is in bad taste, but because I don't want to be guilty of telling old jokes.
A lot of my humor centers on the act of telling jokes and I think this can prevent certain audiences from suspending their feeling of disbelief. It might piss a few people off, but I can't help it.
I loved Omar Vizquel. He tells some really long jokes, and he has his own way of telling them, but he can make every joke very funny. He would always come up with jokes on the loudspeaker on the bus.
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