Comic

Famous quotes containing the word comic:

    Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.
    C. Wright Mills (1916–62)

    Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate,—and meantime it is only puss and her tail.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Whereas the comic confronts simply logical contradictions, the tragic confronts a moral predicament. Not minor matters of true and false but crucial questions of right and wrong, good and evil face the tragic character in a tragic situation.
    —Marie Collins Swabey. Comic Laughter, ch. 7, Yale University Press (1961)