|
If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. He has a heart capable of mirth, and naturally disposed to it. (Joseph Addison)
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof. (Theodor W. Adorno)
All I know about humor is that I don't know anything about it. (Fred Allen)
Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots. (Steve Allen)
There's a few tunes of mine that don't have jokes, but most of them have a joke and they have a humorous point of view somewhere. (Mose Allison)
If the gag is complicated, you spend more time thinking about the way you're drawing it. (Sergio Aragones)
Wit is educated insolence. (Aristotle)
Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit. (Aristotle)
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh. (W. H. Auden)
That word 'funny' always makes me feel uncomfortable. Because if I were trying to be funny, I would be something like Bill Wegman - he really tries to be funny. I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter, and I'm sort of reporting. (John Baldessari)
To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect. (Honore de Balzac)
The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after. (Tallulah Bankhead)
I first pitched the idea of doing a series of cartoons based on Bible stories. They didn't much like it. (Joseph Barbera)
Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time. (Lynda Barry)
I need to be cheered up a lot. I think funny people are people who need to be cheered up. (Lynda Barry)
You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself. (Ethel Barrymore)
I hasten to laugh at everything for fear of being obliged to weep at it. (Pierre Beaumarchais)
Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them. (Alison Bechdel)
-Endgame,1957...
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness... And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more. (Samuel Beckett)
There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them. (Robert Benchley)
A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings. (Henri Bergson)
I live to laugh, and I laugh to live. (Milton Berle)
Laugh. / Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts. (Wendell Berry)
Humor is a leveler. It brings us back to the human level. (Swami Beyondananda)
Art could be ever so funny if it wasn't such a deadly serious business. (Joe Joseph P. Blodgett)
Artists ought to walk a mile in someone else's pants. That way you're a mile away and you have their pants. (Joe Joseph P. Blodgett)
There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them. (Niels Bohr)
Humour is by far the most significant activity of the human brain. (Edward de Bono)
What the joke displays is a switch in perception. This is important in changing the way we think. (Edward de Bono)
Laughter is the closest distance between two people. (Victor Borge)
Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth. (Victor Borge)
I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously. (David Bowie)
I'm not a serious person, and I don't like serious people. (Ray Bradbury)
Negative humor is forgotten immediately. It's the stuff that makes us feel better about our lives that lives long. Much more satisfying. Enter children's books. (Berkely Breathed)
He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news. (Bertolt Brecht)
Humor is just another defense against the universe. (Mel Brooks)
We want to get people laughing; we don't want to offend anybody. (Mel Brooks)
Humor keeps the elderly rolling along, singing a song. When you laugh, it's an involuntary explosion of the lungs. The lungs need to replenish themselves with oxygen. So you laugh, you breathe, the blood runs, and everything is circulating. If you don't laugh, you'll die. (Mel Brooks)
Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion. (Thomas Browne)
One must laugh before one is happy, or one may die without ever laughing at all. (Jean de La Bruyere)
It was a dangerous profession I had chosen ... because no one likes a funny kid. In fact, adults are scared silly of them and tend to warn children who act out that they are going to wind up in prison or worse. It is only when you grow up that they pay you vast sums of money to make them laugh. (Art Buchwald)
Humor is the sunshine of the mind. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
Comedy is tragedy plus time. (Carol Burnett)
Someone who makes you laugh is a comedian. Someone who makes you think and then laugh is a humorist. (George Burns)
The ironic humor comes from the distance between what we understand about ourselves and what is truly going on in ourselves. (Robert Olen Butler)
Let there be more joy and laughter in your living. (Eileen Caddy)
In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first. (George Carlin)
Laugh often, long and loud. Laugh until you gasp for breath. (George Carlin)
Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius. (Thomas Carlyle)
True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper. (Thomas Carlyle)
My father used to brag that I wasn't a ham, I was the whole pig. (Jim Carrey)
I got a lot of support from my parents. That's the one thing I always appreciated. They didn't tell me I was being stupid; they told me I was being funny. (Jim Carrey)
Happiness is your dentist telling you it won't hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill. (Johnny Carson)
There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets? (Dick Cavett)
The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part. (Miguel de Cervantes)
The most wasted day is that in which we have not laughed. (Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort)
In the end, everything is a gag. (Charlie Chaplin)
Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain. (Charlie Chaplin)
Laughter allows us to get past the fear of death. (Deepak Chopra)
He who laughs most, learns best. (John Cleese)
No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humour. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Total absence of humour renders life impossible. (Sidonie Gabrielle Colette)
For a comedy to work, magic has to happen. (Bradley Cooper)
I can't be funny if my feet don't feel right. (Billy Crystal)
It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself. (Salvador Dali)
When I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother. (Rodney Dangerfield)
If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think. (Clarence Darrow)
Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny. (Guy Davenport)
The people who fear humour – and they are many – are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities. (Robertson Davies)
-A Funny Man lyrics
I never saw a rose with such a funny looking smell. (Donovan)
Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth. (Mark van Doren)
It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact. (Marcel Duchamp)
- The Three Musketeers...
I do not often laugh, sir, as you may perceive by the air of my countenance; but nevertheless, I retain the privilege of laughing when I please. (Alexandre Dumas)
All of us have schnozzles... if not in our faces, then in our character, minds or habits. When we admit our schnozzles, instead of defending them, we begin to laugh, and the world laughs with us. (Jimmy Durante)
Wit is an intermittent fountain; kindness is a perennial spring. (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach)
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections. (George Eliot)
He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at. (Epictetus)
The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion. (Richard Feynman)
I'm a plethora of stolen jokes and kitschy references. (Nathan Fillion)
The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again! (Michael Flanders)
We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all. (Jean de La Fontaine)
I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor. (Michael J. Fox)
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee / And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me. (Robert Frost)
Where humor is concerned there are no standards – no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will. (John Kenneth Galbraith)
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. (Mahatma Gandhi)
Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him. (Romain Gary)
Hilaritate bonum excogitatio - Good humour; good invention. (Kjerkius Gennius, 36BC)
Humour is a drug which it's the fashion to abuse. (W. S. Gilbert)
Our comedies are not to be laughed at. (Samuel Goldwyn)
Art must always remain earnest... Art must be serious, no sarcasm, comedy. One does not laugh at a loved one. (Arshile Gorky)
Develop a sense of humor about yourself. (Irwin Greenberg)
Laughter is the music of the soul. (Hap Hagood)
Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not. (Vaclav Havel)
I'm discovering there are innumerable ways to package, promote and sell my humor, as long as I reserve a little for myself to keep bouncing back and laughing off the rejections that are also part of the art of cartooning. (Mark Heath)
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book. (Ernest Hemingway)
Life can be wildly tragic at times... but whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got not to forget to laugh. (Katharine Hepburn)
Yeah, maybe a morbid sense of humour, I wouldn't say it was sick, but maybe other people would. I like bad jokes. (Damien Hirst)
Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs. (David Hockney)
My type of humor is me not caring whether people know what I'm talking about or not. (John Hodgman)
Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common origin in the unconscious. Both are essentially means of outwitting our inner 'censor.' (Jim Holt)
The problem with having a sense of humor is often that people you use it on aren't in a very good mood. (Lou Holtz)
I have seen what a laugh can do. It can transform almost unbearable tears into something bearable, even hopeful. (Bob Hope)
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face. (Victor Hugo)
Honest good humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and laughter abundant. (Washington Irving)
Laugh a lot... try to find something, however small, to celebrate every day. (Melissa Jean)
It's always a miracle when the things that make you laugh in your front room make an audience laugh too. (Charlotte Jones)
Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business. (Chuck Jones)
Laughter can really dissolve the distance between two or more people because our hearts all speak the same tongue, which is love. (Dennis Merritt Jones)
If you could choose one characteristic that would get you through life, choose a sense of humor. (Jennifer Jones)
I'm just an entertainer. All I want to be is funny. I never aspired to play Hamlet. (Danny Kaye)
A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny. (Buster Keaton)
Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing. (Ken Kesey)
You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants. (Stephen King)
Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment. (Grenville Kleiser)
A little humor can temper the most cheeky bragging...'Man, that guy was good! I've never seen such a backhand. He fired that ball like a bullet... You know, he almost beat me?!' Quietly stating a point of truth isn't bragging and delivery is everything. (Jackie Knott)
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness. (Milan Kundera)
Humor is the truth; wit is an exaggeration of the truth. (Stan Laurel)
Let your laughter out / Let your lightness come and shine... (Carin Lavery)
The owl and the pussycat went to sea, / In a beautiful pea green boat. / They took some honey, and plenty of money, / Wrapped up in a five pound note. (Edward Lear)
Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion. (Wyndham Lewis)
I paint to live and I live to paint, but if I were to die I would paint myself into a coroner. (Don Lisa)
If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there. (Martin Luther)
The comedy gods are smiling on me tonight... (Bill Maher)
I wish to live only as long as I can bring laughter to the people. (Hamid Reza Mahisefat)
What I love doing best: making people laugh at themselves. Drawing and painting everyday situations with a humorous slant... good, clean, old-fashioned humor never goes out of style. (Robert Marble)
Chaos in the midst of chaos is not funny, but chaos in the midst of order is. (Steve Martin)
Think of what would happen to us... if there were no humorists; life would be one long Congressional Record. (Thomas L. Masson)
Imagination was given to us to compensate for what we are not; a sense of humor was given to us to console us for what we are. (Mark McGinnis)
A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles. (Mignon McLaughlin)
Jokes are grievances. (Marshall McLuhan)
The sense of humor is the oil of life's engine. Without it, the machinery creaks and groans. No lot is so hard, no aspect of things is so grim, but it relaxes before a hearty laugh. (George S. Merriam)
A wonderful bird is the pelican, / His bill can hold more than his belican, / He can take in his beak, / Food enough for a week, / But I'm damned if I see how the helican. (Dixon Merritt)
Humor is a set of skills that anyone can learn. (C. W. Metcalf)
Laugh is a form of communication which is not always funny. (Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki)
Humor is the spiciest condiment in the feast of existence. Laugh at your mistakes but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them. (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
Humor has been analyzed with great success by any number of people who haven't written any. (Henry Morgan)
Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs. (Christopher Morley)
I've noticed that when people are joking they're usually dead serious, and when they're serious, they're usually pretty funny. (Jim Morrison)
Laughter is more serious than tears. (Toni Morrison)
It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic. (Robert Motherwell)
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them. (Lewis Mumford)
You can't take yourself too seriously. (LeRoy Neiman)
Laughter is the language of the soul. (Pablo Neruda)
And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Whatever is funny is subversive; every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. (George Orwell)
Laughter's the nearest we ever get, or should get, to sainthood. It's the state of grace that saves most of us from contempt. (John James Osborne)
Since everything is but an experience, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter. (Long Chen Pa)
I had thought, on starting this composition, that I should define what humor means to me. However, every time I tried to, I had to go and lie down with a cold wet cloth on my head. (Dorothy Parker)
I can't resist having a joke. Artists I like, such as Breughel, put jokes in their work. I think it's part of reflecting human life. (Grayson Perry)
The stream of American humour flows on unceasingly, and in the intervals of, or after, painting, the tennis racquet is brought forth and the game is played. (Thomas Sergeant Perry)
He laughs best whose laugh lasts. (Laurence J. Peter)
He who laughs, lasts. (Mary Pettibone Poole)
A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits. (Alexander Pope)
Gentle dullness ever loves a joke. (Alexander Pope)
All humor is rooted in pain. (Richard Pryor)
It is better to write of laughter than of tears, for laughter is the property of man. (Francois Rabelais)
You feel completely in control when you hear a wave of laughter coming back at you that you have caused. (Gilda Radner)
Humour brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding. (Agnes Repplier)
There is not one female comic who was beautiful as a little girl. (Joan Rivers)
Show me a person who doesn't like to laugh and I'll show you a person with a toe tag. (Julia Roberts)
A comedian can only last till he either takes himself serious or his audience takes him serious. (Will Rogers)
Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke. (Will Rogers)
We are all here for a spell; get all the good laughs you can. (Will Rogers)
The World Just Makes Me Laugh. (Ugo Rondinone)
Anyone without a sense of humor is at the mercy of everyone else. (William E. Rothschild)
At first, I only laughed at myself. Then I noticed that life itself is amusing. I've been in a generally good mood ever since. (Marilyn vos Savant)
The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself. (Johann Friedrich von Schiller)
A comedy isn't about being funny... a comedy is about characters who dare to know that they may choose a happy ending after all. (Gary D. Schmidt)
The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
If I were given the opportunity to present a gift to the next generation, it would be the ability for each individual to learn to laugh at himself. (Charles Schulz)
It's a very savage kind of humor; it comes out of a great deal of pain. (Martin Scorsese)
Good humor isn't a trait of character; it is an art which requires practice. (David Seabury)
From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere! (Dr. Seuss)
Humour has always been a self-defence mechanism for me. (Brooke Shields)
What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in 'serious' music. (Dmitri Shostakovich)
I don't think I've ever made any conscious decision to be a comic artist, but to me there's something quite anarchic about comedy. (David Shrigley)
A sense of humor... is needed armor. Joy in one's heart and some laughter on one's lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life. (Hugh Sidey)
No matter what your heartache may be, laughing helps you forget it for a few seconds. (Red Skelton)
I have inherited my father's sense of humour about myself. It's a lot more pleasant to make fun of yourself than when someone else does. (Stephen Sondheim)
If a person desires to be a humorist it is necessary that the people around him shall be at least as wise as he is, otherwise his humor will not be comprehended. (James Stephens, author)
The art world is best understood as a comedy of the more serious kind. Its natural proportions are those of the monastery or the university, where the tension between high idealism and low ambition calls for morally pointed satire. (Mark Stevens)
It's very hard to write humor. (Mark Strand)
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own. (Jonathan Swift)
The burden of the self is lightened when I laugh at myself. (Rabindranath Tagore)
I learned very early that an audience would relax and look at things differently if they felt they could laugh with you from time to time. There's an energy that comes through the release of tension that is laughter. (Twyla Tharp)
Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. (James Thurber)
Humourists lead... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats. (James Thurber)
I had placed my stick on the table, as I do every evening. It had been specially made to suit my height, to enable me to walk without too much difficulty. As I was standing up, a customer called to me: 'Monsieur, don't forget your pencil.' It was very unkind, but most funny. (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec)
Any man who has had the job I've had and didn't have a sense of humor wouldn't still be here. (Harry S. Truman)
-in J. M. W. Turner's studio...
Whistler exclaimed: 'Don't touch it, the paint's wet!' 'Oh, that's all right,' replied Mark with his characteristic drawl: 'these aren't my best gloves!' (Mark Twain)
Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand. (Mark Twain)
To laugh with others is one of life's great pleasures. To be laughed at by others is one of life's great hurts. (Frank Tyger)
A sense of humor cushions the potholes on the road of life. (Frank Tyger)
You laugh at me because I am different, but I laugh at you because you are all the same. (Author unknown)
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? (John Updike)
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. (Peter Ustinov)
God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. (Voltaire)
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion... I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous. (Alice Walker)
A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life. (William Arthur Ward)
As soon as I got funny, I killed any majestic intentions in my work. (William Wegman)
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. (E. B. White)
I'm often as frustrated at the world as most people are. But I think frustration is hilarious. One of my missions is to bring humor into fine art. It's sacred. (Wayne White)
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't. (Alfred North Whitehead)
If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you. (Billy Wilder)
Comedy is acting out optimism. (Robin Williams)
Comedy isn't just timing; it's about rooting out the funny in the real. You just bend reality to the left a little. (Henry Winkler)
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
We have an infinite number of reasons to be happy, and a serious responsibility not to be serious. (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)
This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought. (Lin Yutang)
Laughter is very infectious, and why it should be so is a most interesting neurological problem. But it also has other, more physiological, benefits. Apparently it boosts the immune system, reduces stress hormones, massages the heart and diaphragm (thus providing some 'internal' exercise for muscles) and engenders a 'feel good' factor. (Semir Zeki)
What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously. (William K. Zinsser)
| 
