A Quote by Tom Wolfe
Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.
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Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it or you don't. You can't attain it. There are terrible forms of professional humor, the humorists' humor. That can be awful. It depresses me because it is artificial. You can't always be humorous, but a professional humorist must. That is a sad phenomenon.
I had a nice part at big newspapers, small newspapers, and then I went to a very big newspaper - 'The Wall Street Journal.' I wrote longer pieces, and I got tired of working so hard on stories that had a shelf life of essentially one day. So then I started working on longer magazine pieces and realized then that you might as well be writing a book.
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.
The thing that I get so often with network comedies - and, I think, some of the most brilliant people in the world do them - but it's easy to hide behind a joke. I kind of feel like when you have to face things, and you don't have humor, it becomes very vulnerable; it exposes your deepest and darkest fears in some aspects.
I can't speak for the Jewish population, but I attribute my sense of humor to the tragic moments of my life. The best way to overcome certain tragedies is to develop a thick skin and sense of humor about things. Of course, I am very politically conscious and careful about my comedy. But when I do push an envelope, it's with a purpose.
I think I love humor in poetry, but not that slapstick cheap easy humor, but that uncomfortable, "did she say that out loud?" kind of humor.
Humor comes in all forms, and everyone has their cup of tea about what makes them laugh. But the day we censor humor is a sad one for sure.
Old Zen was very funny; there was a great deal of humor and happiness. Zen today seems much drier. While there's a certain amount of humor, it seems to lack that total intensity because humor is one of the primary tools for liberation.
I use a lot of humor in my writing. But it's completely black humor.
Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
I grew up in a family that was very barbed and difficult, and there was a lot of humor. None of it was painless humor. All of it was at someone else's expense. It was kind of always about power.
In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that's a really classic form of humor.
With humor you have so many options with topics and length, I mean I can write humor essays in books now and they can be as long as I want them to be.
Many things have been written, including by me, linking humor and pain. Mostly, in my case, the humor part keeps me sane. If I spent all my hours writing things like "Fatal Distraction," I'd become a brooding, erratic melancholic. I'd be Raskolnikov.
There's public humor, and there's private humor, and they're all appropriate in their own way, and you shouldn't - just as you wouldn't have a megaphone and say certain things that you would say around your friends - things that are perfectly all right within your close social group with whom you share a certain context.
I suppose I look for humor in most situations because it humanizes things; it makes a character much more three-dimensional if there's some kind of humor. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud type of stuff, just a sense that there is a humorous edge to things. I do like that.
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