If you can get humor and seriousness at the same time, you’ve created a special little thing, and that’s what I’m looking for, because if you get pompous, you lose everything.

Simon is describing an artistic ideal: the rare balance where wit and gravity coexist without canceling each other out. Humor can disarm an audience and make difficult truths bearable; seriousness gives the work emotional weight and stakes. For Simon, that fusion produces something “special”—art that feels human rather than preachy. His warning about becoming “pompous” suggests that self-importance, moralizing, or inflated rhetoric breaks the connection between artist and listener, turning lived experience into performance. The quote reflects a songwriter’s craft ethic: keep perspective, let irony and tenderness share the same space, and avoid the grandiose tone that can make art feel false.