Imagination
was given to man to compensate him for what he is not.
A sense of humor was provided to console him for what
he is.
— Horace Walpole
Laughter
would be bereaved if snobbery died.
— Peter Ustinov
Laughter is pleasant, but the exertion is too much
for me.
— Thomas Love Peacock
Every day is an
opportunity
to waste another day — particularly if you don't
fill it with humor.
— Dave Erhard
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman
and a pretty girl.
— Charlie Chaplin
Sex is Number 1 of my
Top-10 joys in retirement. Number 2 is reading
How to Retire Happy, Wild, and
Free. I forgot the other eight.
— from Graffiti for the Enlightened Soul
The Three Laws of the Human
Existence:
1. There is an explanation for everything
2. All explanations are false
3. The meaning of life is defined by the first two
laws
— Mike Slack
I knew
nothing about farce until I read [Feydeau's]
Puce a l'Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly
serious business
it is.
— John Mortimer
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
We often laughed at
others in our
house, and I picked up the craft of being polite
while people were present and laughing later if there
was anything to laugh about.
— Muriel Spark
Charlie Chaplin's genius was in comedy. He has no
sense of humor, particularly about himself.
— Lita Grey Chaplin, Second wife of Charlie Chaplin
I wouldn't have to
learn how to control my anger if other people learned
how to control their
stupidity.
— Unknown funny
person.
That's noteworthy, indeed. I will have to add it to
my list of other things that I don't give a shit
about.
— Unknown funny person
The reason that there
are so few women comics is that so few women can bear
being laughed at.
— Anna Russell, Anglo American comedienne and
singer
The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may
analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle
us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to
reshape.
— Thornton Wilder
Humorists can never
start to take themselves seriously. It's literary
suicide.
— Erma Bombeck
There is not one
female comic who was beautiful as a little girl.
— Joan Rivers
The test of a real
comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens
his mouth.
— George Jean Nathan
I think being funny is not anyone's first
choice.
— Woody Allen
Good
humor is one of the best articles of dress one can
wear in society.
— William Makepeace Thackeray
The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You
can't fake it . . . try to fake three laughs in an
hour- ha ha ha ha ha- they'll take you away, man. You
can't.
— Lenny Bruce
If I had no sense of
humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Humor is just another defense against the
universe.
— Mel Brooks
In democracy both a deep reverence and a sense of
the comic are requisite.
— Carl Sandburg
If I get a hard audience they are not going to get
away until they laugh. Those seven laughs a minute-
I've got to have them.
— Ken Dodd (b. 1931), British comic
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a
comedy in long-shot.
— Charlie Chaplin
My routines come out of total unhappiness. My
audiences are my group therapy.
— Joan Rivers
Comedy is tragedy that
happens to other people.
— Angela Carter
The guy has baggy pants, flat feet, the most
miserable, bedraggled-looking little bastard you ever
saw; makes itchy gestures as though he's got crabs
under his arms- but he's funny.
— Sterling Ford (1883-1939), U.S. comic actor
When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy,
one has a success, but when the same things are funny
and melancholic at the same time,
it's just wonderful.
— François Truffaut
In Milwaukee last month a man died laughing over one
of his own jokes. That's what makes it so tough for us
outsiders. We have to fight home competition.
— Robert Benchley
Everyone likes a
kidder, but nobody lends him money.
— Arthur Miller
The role of humour is to make people fall down and
writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom
of it.
— Alan Coren
Six Secrets to Being a
Successful Humorist
1. Be scared, unhappy, and an outcast as a kid.
2. Drop out of high school.
3. Spend time alone.
4. Don't take a comedy course.
5. Read other humorists but don't worship them.
6. Don't get your hopes up.
— Bruce McCall
When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of
race going on between his brain and his expression.
— Bill Bryson
Freud's theory was that when a joke opens a window
and all those bats and bogeymen fly out, you get a
marvellous feeling of relief and elation. The trouble
with Freud is that he never had to play the old Glasgow
Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had
both lost.
— Ken Dodd
It's certainly easy to mock some things ... Oddly
enough though I've never found it easy to mock anything
of value. Only things that are tawdry and fatuous —
perhaps it's just me.
— Stephen Fry
It is easy to forget that the most important aspect
of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its
ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation,
and take it seriously.
— Stehpen Fry
Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore,
looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked
of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the
humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she
enquired, `Humour studies would that be, sir?'
— Keith Wathershouse
As humourless a lump of dough as ever held a
torchlight vigil outside the South African Embassy or
stuck an AIDS awareness ribbon on an unwilling
first-nighter.
— Stephen Fry
A sense of humor reduces people
and problems to their proper proportions.
— Anon wise person
Writing TV humor isn't as hard
as listening to it.
— Anon wise person
A sense of humor is a test of
sanity.
— Anon wise person
Get-well cards have
become so humorous that if you don't get sick you're
missing a lot of fun.
— Anon wise person
The funniest thing about comedy is that you never
know why people laugh. I know what makes them laugh but
trying to get your hands on the why of it is like
trying to pick an eel out of a tub of water.
— W. C. Fields
Good taste and humour ... are a contradiction in
terms, like a chaste whore.
— Malcolm Muggeridge
She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a
train going through a tunnel.
— P. G. Wodehouse
Mark my words, when a society has
to resort to the atnrv for its humour, the writing is
on the wall.
— Alan Bennett
[Comedy is] the kindly contemplation of the
incongruous.
— P. G. Wodehouse
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a
really funny book.
— Ernest Hemingway
A sense of humor
enables you to laugh at anything that would make you
extremely mad if it happened to you.
— Anon wise
person
