“You may humbug the town for some time longer as a tragedian; but comedy is a serious thing, so don’t try it yet.”
— Attributed to
David Garrick
I dismissed this quote for years. Comedy is serious? It sounded like the kind of thing someone cross-stitches onto a pillow and sells at a craft fair. Then a director I deeply respected handed me a dog-eared paperback during a brutal rehearsal week. We had been grinding through a comedic two-hander for three weeks, and nothing was landing. The laughs felt forced, the timing was off, and the cast was miserable. She had bookmarked a single page — no note, no explanation, just a sticky arrow pointing at a paragraph about David Garrick telling a young actor that comedy was a “serious thing.” I read it standing in the wings, still sweating from a failed run-through. Something clicked. Comedy had always felt like the easier cousin of drama to me, and that assumption had been quietly poisoning every choice I made onstage. That moment reframed everything — and it sent me down a rabbit hole about where this quote actually came from.
The Quote and Its Tangled Origins
The full version of this saying — the one with “humbug the town” — is vivid, specific, and almost cinematic in its bluntness. However, tracing it to a definitive source is genuinely complicated. Most people credit the legendary eighteenth-century English actor David Garrick . The problem is that the earliest written record of this specific exchange appeared in 1834 — a full fifty-five years after Garrick’s death in 1779 .
That 1834 source was Thomas Campbell’s biography “Life of Mrs. Siddons.” Campbell included the exchange as a footnote, describing a conversation between Garrick and a young actor named Jack Bannister. According to Campbell, Bannister had mentioned to Garrick that he was considering a move into comedy. Garrick’s response, as Campbell recorded it, was characteristically sharp:
“Eh, eh? Why no, don’t think of that — you may humbug the town for some time longer as a tragedian; but comedy is a serious thing, so don’t try it yet.”
Campbell presented this as a real exchange. Bannister, however, ignored the advice entirely. He went on to play the hilariously pompous Don Whiskerandos in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s satirical play “The Critic,” and that comic role effectively eclipsed his earlier tragic work . The irony is delicious — Garrick warned him off comedy, and comedy made him a star.
But here is the central credibility problem. Campbell wrote this account decades after the fact. He never claimed to witness the exchange himself. Additionally, no contemporary record from Garrick’s lifetime corroborates this specific wording. Therefore, while the attribution to Garrick feels plausible given his reputation and personality, historians treat it with appropriate skepticism.
A Earlier Voice: George Colman in 1775
Interestingly, a thematically identical idea appeared in print before Campbell’s biography — and before Garrick’s death. In December 1775, the dramatist and essayist George Colman published a letter in “The Universal Magazine” of London . He signed it with the pseudonym “The Blackguard,” though his authorship was later confirmed when the piece was reprinted under his name in a 1787 collection.
Colman wrote:
“From the days of Aeschylus to yesterday, few Writers have been equal to the execution of a good Tragedy; to write a Comedy is a serious matter; and even an excellent Farce-monger (says Diderot) is no ordinary character.”
This is striking. Colman articulated the core idea — comedy demands serious craft — at least nine years before Campbell put similar words in Garrick’s mouth. Furthermore, Colman was a respected playwright and theatre manager himself . He understood the craft from the inside. His framing drew on a lineage stretching back to ancient Greece, invoking Aeschylus to argue that comedy’s apparent lightness masked profound difficulty.
This doesn’t mean Garrick never said something similar. Both men moved in the same theatrical circles. However, Colman’s 1775 publication establishes that the idea predates Campbell’s 1834 attribution by nearly six decades.
How the Wording Evolved Over Decades
One of the most fascinating aspects of this quote’s history is watching the language shift across successive retellings. Each new version simplifies, sharpens, or reframes the original — and each tells us something about what different eras found most compelling about the idea.
The 1834 Campbell version is the longest and most conversational: “you may humbug the town for some time longer as a tragedian; but comedy is a serious thing.” It feels like an actual spoken exchange — informal, slightly condescending, and very Garrick.
By 1872, a Nashville newspaper reprinted the sentiment with noticeably different phrasing . “Humbug” became “fool people.” “Serious thing” became “serious business.” The language modernized, and the tone shifted from theatrical insider-speak to plain American directness.
Then, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quote shed its narrative frame entirely. The long exchange between Garrick and Bannister compressed into a single punchy aphorism:
“Any fool can play tragedy, but comedy is serious business.”
This version travels faster. It fits on a placard. It works as an epigraph. Consequently, it became the dominant form — even though it loses the specific texture and wit of the original exchange.
In 1938, Sir John Simon delivered a speech honoring actress Julia Neilson and used this compressed version . Meanwhile, in 1991, Rex Harrison titled his autobiography “A Damned Serious Business” and used an even more emphatic variant as his epigraph: “Any fool can play Tragedy, but Comedy, Sir, is a damned serious business” — attributing it to Garrick . Harrison’s title helped cement this version in popular memory.
The Broader Cultural Conversation
This quote didn’t evolve in isolation. It reflects a long-running debate within theatre and comedy about which demands more from a performer. Interestingly, not everyone agreed with Garrick’s position — even in his own era.
A 1776 Edinburgh magazine printed advice from a theatre company head that flipped the argument entirely . She told a young man: “You should by all means think of low comedy — you may make a figure in that, but, believe me, in tragedy you have no hopes at all.” This suggests the debate was genuinely live, with practitioners holding opposing views.
Additionally, the related saying “dying is easy; comedy is hard” circulates in parallel, often misattributed to various actors on their deathbeds . Both sayings share the same counterintuitive logic — the thing that looks effortless is actually the harder craft.
Film director Wesley Ruggles echoed the sentiment in 1940, telling a reporter: “Comedy is a serious business. It’s harder to get a laugh than a tear, any day” . W. C. Fields, one of Hollywood’s great comic performers, reportedly told his companion Carlotta Monti: “Comedy is a business, a serious business with only one purpose — to make people laugh” . Fields added that physical comedy produced laughs from “the belly” — a visceral, almost mechanical process that demanded precise timing and execution.
English actress Penelope Keith invoked Garrick directly in a 1982 interview, saying: “Any fool can play tragedy. It’s serious business playing comedy” . Keith’s statement demonstrates how effectively the compressed version had replaced the original by the late twentieth century. Most people citing Garrick at this point had never encountered the full Bannister exchange.
David Garrick: The Man Behind the Attribution
Why does Garrick’s name stick to this quote so persistently? Source Partly because he genuinely embodied its argument. Garrick was himself celebrated in both tragic and comic roles — a rarity in an era when actors typically specialized . His naturalistic approach to performance revolutionized English theatre. He understood, from direct experience, that comedy required a different and arguably more demanding set of skills than tragedy.
Tragedians could lean on elevated language, grand gestures, and audience expectations built over centuries. Comic performers, however, faced immediate, unforgiving feedback. A tragic scene that fell flat might still feel weighty and intentional. A joke that missed was simply — painfully — not funny. The audience didn’t politely suppress their disappointment. They sat in silence, and everyone felt it.
Garrick’s supposed advice to Bannister fits this worldview perfectly. Telling a young tragedian that he could “humbug the town” a bit longer before attempting comedy wasn’t cruelty — it was a precise diagnosis of where the higher professional risk lay. Comedy demanded technical mastery, split-second timing, and an intuitive read of the audience. These skills took years to develop. Tragedy, Garrick implied, offered more room for a performer to hide.
Whether or not Garrick actually said these specific words, the sentiment aligns with everything we know about his theatrical philosophy. That alignment is probably why the attribution stuck.
What “Humbug the Town” Actually Means
Modern readers sometimes stumble over the word “humbug.” Today it carries a Dickensian flavor — Scrooge’s “Bah, Source humbug!” — suggesting dismissiveness or curmudgeonly skepticism. However, in eighteenth-century theatrical usage, “humbug” meant something closer to “deceive” or “bluff” . Garrick, in this reading, was telling Bannister that he could continue fooling London audiences with his tragic performances for a while longer.
This reading makes the quote considerably sharper — and funnier. Garrick wasn’t simply saying comedy was difficult. He was implying that Bannister’s tragic acting was already a kind of sustained con. The young man was getting away with something in tragedy. Comedy, however, would expose him immediately. There was nowhere to hide.
This interpretation also explains why the quote resonated so strongly with theatre professionals across generations. It acknowledged an uncomfortable truth that practitioners recognized but rarely stated openly: audiences can be fooled by solemnity. Gravity and intensity create an impression of depth, even when the performance is hollow. Comedy offers no such cover.
The Quote’s Modern Resonance
Today, this saying circulates most actively in two contexts: theatre training programs and comedy writing rooms. In both settings, it functions as a corrective against the assumption that making people laugh is somehow less demanding than making them cry.
Stand-up comedians, sketch writers, and sitcom runners frequently invoke the spirit of this idea . Source The mechanics of a joke — setup, misdirection, punchline, timing — demand the same rigorous craft as any dramatic structure. Additionally, comedy fails more visibly and more immediately than drama. A dramatic scene that doesn’t quite land can still feel meaningful. A joke that doesn’t land is just an awkward silence.
The evolution from Garrick’s long, specific exchange with Bannister to the punchy modern aphorism “any fool can play tragedy” mirrors how useful ideas travel. They compress. They sharpen. They shed context in exchange for portability. However, something is genuinely lost in that compression. The original version — with its theatrical gossip, its specific young actor, its “humbug the town” — is richer, stranger, and more honest about the complicated relationship between talent, craft, and audience manipulation.
Conclusion: Serious Business, Then and Now
So where does this leave us? George Colman articulated the core idea in 1775. Thomas Campbell attributed a vivid, specific version to David Garrick in 1834 — fifty-five years after Garrick’s death, which limits its reliability as direct evidence. Over the following century and a half, the quote compressed, modernized, and multiplied across theatre, film, and popular culture. Rex Harrison, W. C. Fields, Penelope Keith, and countless others kept the idea alive, each adding their own inflection.
The attribution to Garrick remains plausible but unverified. What is certain is that the idea itself — that comedy demands more, not less, from its practitioners — has proven remarkably durable. It has survived because working comedians and comedy writers recognize it as true in their bones, regardless of who first said it.
That director who handed me the paperback backstage never explained her thinking. She didn’t need to. The quote did the work. Sometimes the most useful ideas arrive without footnotes — and the best thing you can do is take them seriously.