That word ‘funny’ always makes me feel uncomfortable. Because if I were trying to be funny, I would be something like Bill Wegman – he really tries to be funny. I don’t try to be funny. It’s just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter, and I’m sort of reporting.
I’ve seen so many women in my family, so many mothers, that have lost children in the war in such absurd ways. I wonder how they do it. How do they keep living? How do they keep smiling?
What’s the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.
I’m often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That’s impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.
When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can’t bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.
I’d love to do a comedy – something where a character has to use humor to navigate the absurdities of life.
Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.
The absurd consequences of neglecting structure but using the concept of order just the same are evident if one examines the present terminology of information theory.
He would be a very absurd legislator who should pretend to set bounds to his country’s welfare, lest it should perish by knowing no bounds.
Of course, politicians always say they’re just describing their opponents’ positions, even if they are in fact offering absurd caricatures, if not outright lies.
A Republic without parties is a complete anomaly. The histories of all popular governments show absurd is the idea of their attempting to exist without parties.
I always think it’s absurd when people go, ‘How can you have a show about Batman without Batman?’ ‘Gotham’ is plenty fascinating, ‘Chinatown’ style.
When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it’s absurd. But it’s tragic at the same time.
When things are difficult, awful, stressful, the thing that always gets you through is a sense of humour. I don’t mean – well, maybe I do – laugh at the hangman as he puts the noose around your neck. But an eye, an ear, for the ridiculous, the absurd in life, can get you through a lot.
Humor is very interesting to me. My films are not comedies, but there’s comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life.
Ive definitely got a sense of not being very good at stuff. Its sort of absurd because, you know, Ive done really quite well for myself, but I still really doubt myself. Its just the way I am.
I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.
If I’ve learned anything from social media, it’s truly that the most irrelevant people always say the most absurd stuff.
The caricature of what George Osborne is doing on the fiscal side is absurd. If you read some of the commentary, particularly from the left, you would think he was turning the clock back to the 1930s.
Recording ‘Tusk’ was quite absurd. The studio contract rider for refreshments was like a telephone directory.
It does not take much technical knowledge to understand why the interlinking of rivers is an absurd idea and a ruinous project.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
To a straight man, the notion of walking around as a coiffed, waxed, nail-polish-wearing, lispy dude is uproariously absurd. As people, we find absurdities funny. That’s our first step in making sense of them.
Courts are supposed to interpret laws to avoid ‘absurd results’ and to avoid constitutional problems – such as infringing on the free speech rights of Americans.
I knew for years I wanted to write a novel that addressed the personal trauma of my older sister, who suffered – and still suffers – from mental illness. For a long time I imagined – and I know it’s absurd – that she was an indirect casualty of the Vietnam War.
Obviously Madonna reinforces everything absurd and offensive.
Schiff has pre-scripted a televised production titled ‘The Impeachment Inquiry Against President Trump.’ The story would likely be deemed too absurd and too boring to make it onto the silver screen as a drama, though it might succeed as a comedic farce – too silly to be taken seriously.
In a way, advertising, for all its shallowness, its love of design, its modishness and its self-justification, is curiously innocent. The idea of the hidden persuader or the manipulator is largely absurd.
To say that I could manipulate one of the men who has shown the most courage before the Cuban government, who gets beaten every day, who did a hunger strike that freed political prisoners… I think that’s absurd.
When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.
Actually, it is precisely in overworked countries like Japan, England and the US that people watch an absurd amount of television. Up to four hours a day in England, which adds up to nine years over an average lifetime.
When you look at it that way, you can see how absurd it is that we individualize ourselves with our fences and hoarded possessions.
I’m definitely a centrist and feel like both parties can be absurd.
It’s an absurd world – you know, billionaires in Birkenstocks. But I’d rather have nerdy tech guys as the next Carnegie than oil tycoons.
I like the absurd and the surreal: the Coen brothers, Bunuel, Kubrick.
I don’t think American family sitcoms are mean. I guess I really love ‘Arrested Development.’ I guess they are quite mean in that, but that is also a very silly, surreal, absurd show as well, and it has got a heart as well.
As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.
It’s quite absurd to act against a smoke creature that is not there.
When I was starting out, doing guest spots on TV, and even commercials, I would go in with a whole crazy wardrobe and some terrible accent. Obviously, I was doing too much. If you bring too much flavor to it, it’s absurd. There’s something to just being spontaneous.
Any criticism of Thatcher throws a dangerously absurd light on the entire machinery of British politics. Thatcher’s name must be protected, not because of all the wrong that she had done, but because the people around her allowed her to do it.
In life, a lot of great ideas sound insane or absurd at first.
Space travel is the only technology that is more dangerous and more expensive now than it was in its first year. Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin, the space shuttle ended up being more dangerous and more expensive to fly than those first throwaway rockets, even though large portions of it were reusable. It’s absurd.
To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.
Saying that fights in Japan were fixed and that me, along with other guys like Silva, Minotauro, etc., did not win those fights legitimately is an ultimate and absurd nonsense.
The defeat of Obamacare will come from the realization that the very idea of a government-administered health care system is absurd… and by people opting out of the system and developing workarounds.
There are many countries where you can only believe more or you can believe less. But in the United States we have this incredible smorgasbord, and it really interests me why people are drawn to one faith rather than another, especially to a system of belief that to an outsider seems absurd or dangerous.
Money is speech. It’s incongruous to say a multimillionaire can spend as much on his own campaign as he wants, but you can only give $2,300. His free speech rights are different from yours, thus violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. It’s absurd.
If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.
Why on earth would free people remain prisoners in a cage of absurd laws and regulation, with rigid constraints that humiliate the true needs of the people and their country?
I remember thinking, when I was playing Hedda Gabler, that several sequences of the play were utterly absurd.
I just heard a very funny story about somebody who died yesterday, I’m sorry to say so but it was so absurd that you can’t help laughing. And the person that was concerned about that story was laughing too.
It’s become uncool to play other people’s songs, and that’s absurd. It has got to change. It’s the reason why everything’s so mediocre.
That a district judge would overrule the president of the United States on a matter of border security in wartime is absurd.
Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.
I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic – hyper-realistic – stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn’t meld the two.
