If somebody accuses you in a story of being a crook, you can demand that they prove it. But if a comic says it and you protest, people say, 'What's the matter, you can't take a joke?'
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Thomas J. Brazaitis (March 14, 1992) "Comics' Barbs Keep White House Hopefuls On The Run", The Plain Dealer, p. 4A.Robert Orben
The more one suffers, the more sense, I believe, one gains for the comic. Only by the most profound suffering does one gain real competence in the comic, which with a word magically transforms the rational creature called man into a Fratze [caricature]. This competence is like a policeman’s self-assurance when he abruptly grips his club and does not tolerate any talk or blocking of traffic. The victim protests, he objects, he insists on being respected as a citizen, he demands a hearing-immediately there is a second rap from the club, and that means: Please move on! Don’t stand there! In other words, to want to stand there to protest, to demand a hearing, is just a poor pathetic wretch’s attempt to really amount to something, but the comic turns the fellow around, just as the policeman who gets him turned around in a hurry and, by seeing him from behind, with the help of his club makes him comic. Yet this sense of the comic has to be acquired so painfully that one cannot quite wish to have it. But the sense of the comic presses in on me particularly every time my suffering brings me in contact with other people.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
I'd like to be remembered as someone who kept the comic novel going for another generation or so. I fear the comic novel is in retreat. A joke is by definition politically incorrect — it assumes a butt, and a certain superiority in the teller. The culture won't put up with that for much longer.
Martin Amis
Reporter: How many people who labor in the same musical vineyard in which you toil - how many are protest singers? That is, people who use their music, and use the songs to protest the, uh, social state in which we live today: the matter of war, the matter of crime, or whatever it might be.
Bob Dylan: Um...how many?
Reporter: Yes. How many?
Bob Dylan: Uh, I think there's about, uh...136.
Reporter: You say about 136, or you mean exactly 136?
Bob Dylan: Uh, it's either 136 or 142.Bob Dylan
As a science fiction fan, I have long been very familiar with the various themes in the field. The superman theme has been one of them ever since Samson and Hercules. I just sat down and wrote a story of that type — only in this first story, the Superman was a villain.
A couple of months after I published this story, it occurred to me that a Superman as a hero rather than as a villain might make a great comic strip character in the vein of Tarzan, only more super and sensational than that great character. Joe and I drew it up as a comic book.Jerry Siegel
We physicians protest the outrage of holding the entire world hostage. We protest the moral obscenity that each of us is being continuously targeted for extinction. We protest the ongoing increase in overkill. We protest the expansion of the arms race to space. We protest the diversion of scarce resources from aching human needs. Dialogue without deeds brings the calamity ever closer, as snail-paced diplomacy is outdistanced by missile-propelled technology. We physicians demand deeds to implement further deeds which will lead to the abolition of all nuclear weaponry.
We recognise that before abolition can become a reality, the nuclear arms race must be halted.Bernard Lown
Orben, Robert
Orczy, Baroness Emma
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