quotations about humor
Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations.
STEVE ALLEN
Funny People
Humor is reason gone mad.
GROUCHO MARX
attributed, The Ultimate Book of Quotations
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Opus 200
Now everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody Else, but when it happens to you, why it seems to lose some of its Humor.
WILL ROGERS
The Illiterate Digest
The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world.
VACLAV HAVEL
address upon receiving the Open Society Prize, June 24, 1999
When you've killed the sense of humor of a nation, you've killed the nation.
RED SKELTON
attributed, Phillips' Treasury of Humorous Quotations
Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it or you don't. You can't attain it. There are terrible forms of professional humor, the humorists' humor. That can be awful. It depresses me because it is artificial. You can't always be humorous, but a professional humorist must. That is a sad phenomenon.
HEINRICH BÖLL
The Paris Review, spring 1983
Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
The Garden of Folly
Humor is when the joke is on you but hits the other fellow first.
LANGSTON HUGHES
prefatory note, The Book of Negro Humor
Humor is how we find comfort in the totally illogical, for it is the bridge back to the logical.
LEWIS BLACK
Nothing's Sacred
Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.
MARK TWAIN
"What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us?"
A joke's a very serious thing.
CHARLES CHURCHILL
The Ghost
A bitter jest, when it comes too near the truth, leaves a sharp sting behind it.
TACITUS
Annales
Humor won't save you; it doesn't really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing. In the end there's just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there's only death.
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
The Elementary Particles
Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
A Last Vintage
The law of levity is allowed to supersede the law of gravity.
R. A. LAFFERTY
Space Chantey
When Humor goes, there goes civilization.
ERMA BOMBECK
attributed, On Being Blonde: Wit and Wisdom from the World's Most Infamous Blondes
A good comedian can say things funny and other guys just say funny things.
FRED ALLEN
The Sunday Press, August 9, 1959
Should we call it humor? Is there a theory of humor? For a phenomenon that is so universal to humans, it is a paradox that there is so little agreement among scholars about how it operates, what it is, or what to label it.
CHARLES S. GULAS & MARC G. WEINBERGER
Humor in Advertising: A Comprehensive Analysis
Comedy too can sometimes discern what is right.
ARISTOPHANES
The Acharnians