15 Inspirational Quotes By and For Comedians

This one time, in improv rehearsal, I was on the verge of crying, overwhelmed by the weight of a million tasks that had come at me during the day. In a split second, all that changed when a fellow player made a joke about a squirrel’s fluffy tail, and I was laughing so hard I felt more alive than in the 20 hours I’d been awake that day.

That’s the thing about a sense of humor. It sustains us. It can increase survival – for ourselves, for those around us. That fact is not scientifically proven but feels more than accurate from my perspective. 

Taking a look at your situation and finding a way to ridicule it can make it less of a hardship. It diminishes its power over you. Ever had anyone tell you a way to get out of a fight is to make the other person laugh? Yeah. That’s what’s up here. 

That’s not to say that you can make fun of someone else in a rough situation. We don’t get to be critical of another’s struggle. But, using humor for self-preservation is more than seeing the “silver lining” of the clouds. It’s looking up while the rain is pummeling your face and screaming “99 clouds walk into a bar…”* 

And, for that reason, I thought I’d look to a few comedians for inspirational quotes that can get you through a storm. Feel free to add your favorites in the comments.

“The unknown is where we go to find new things, and intuition is how we find them.”

-Viola Spolin

“While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die – whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.”

-Gilda Radner

“Life is an improvisation. You have no idea what’s gonna happen next, and you are mostly just yanking ideas out of your ass as you go along.”

-Stephen Colbert

“Just say yes and you’ll figure it out afterwards.”

-Tina Fey

“My whole thing is to entertain, make people laugh and to forget about the real world for awhile.”

-Dan Aykroyd

“There’s power in looking silly and not caring that you do.”

-Amy Poehler

“The secret is to have a sense of yourself, your real self, your unique self.”

– Bill Murray

“There is no top. You are never going to reach the top if you go for success. That way lies madness.”

– Keegan-Michael Key

“If people tell me something is impossible, I just want to prove that. I want to know that that’s for certain. I don’t want to not do something because someone says I can’t.”

-Chris Gethard

“I always gravitate towards things that are not beautiful, but broken and weird and fascinating.”

– Kate McKinnon

“You have to be real with yourself. No one is doing that. People are too concerned with making everything look nice and calm and pretty.”

– Donald Glover

“There’s humor in everything. There’s gotta be humor in everything.”

-Amy Sedaris

“We can convince ourselves to do things in conjunction with one another that we wouldn’t have been able to do as an individual.”

-Jordan Peele

“You can’t make a cloudy day a sunny day, but can embrace it and decide it’s going to be a good day after all.”

-Jane Lynch

“Comedy is acting out optimism.”

-Robin Williams

* The joke had to be finished:

99 clouds walk into a bar. The bartender says, “we don’t serve clouds here,” and the clouds reply with a pout, “Aw. No one ever wants cumulUS.”