Quotes About Humor

Sometimes at night when we were watching TV, he would speak to his belly as if it were a pet, giving it a little pat and asking, "A little popcorn? Another beer?

I remember McPhee's notes, penciled in the margins: If humor is tragedy plus time, this needs more time. It wasn't the first occasion I was forced to think about the line between funny and mean, between punching down, not up, to figure out how to write about the things that made me angry in a way that was powerful, not didactic or unhinged.

I'm not sure whether that had to do with the humor, or with the unfashionable fairy-tale ending, which is very different from much of what I read in The New Yorker, where short stories seem to end with someone staring off at the white walls of a white room, and you think that something's happened but you're not quite sure what.

Better Peter than me

Oh my God,' Beatrice thought. Her mom had flour on her midsection and crumbs on her bosom. She'd been making brioche, and she smelled like yeast and sugar. It was like a loaf of bread had invaded her room. A loaf of bread that wanted to talk about sex.

If you are clinically insane, by which I mean you wake up in the morning, and you think you are an onion, this is your car, (about the BMW X3).

I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool.

I therefore have to use The Force. And weirdly, this doesn't work very well. I don't understand why, because on the last census, I put my religion down as Jedi Knight...

it seemed appropriate that I should develop some kind of illness. This is a good idea when you are at a loose end because everything, up to and including herpes, is better than being bored.

Recently, I spent eight days in a car with my co-host from Top Gear James May, who has a notoriously flatulent bottom. But because he was living on army rations the interior was always pine fresh and lemon zesty.

You know, I've nearly been killed by a poisonous flying lizard-snake, and came close to becoming a squid-croc snack. And you nearly died from stubbing your toe?

The British version of 'Shit My Dad Says' is really entertaining.

Where's your kilt? How about this, he said in a low voice. You don't ask me about haggis and bagpipes, and I won't ask you about garlic and Goodfellas.

I never knew you played the banjo! cried Harris and I, in one breath. Not exactly, replied George: but it's very easy, they tell me; and I've got the instruction book! From Three Men in a Boat

Cultivate, I said, a sense of humor. From a humorous point of view this lunch is rather good.

I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.

Aunt Maria would mildly observe that, next time Uncle Podger was going to hammer a nail into the wall, she hoped he'd let her know in time, so that she could make arrangements to go and spend a week with her mother while it was being done.

George got out his banjo after supper, and wanted to play it, but Harris objected: he said he had got a headache, and did not feel strong enough to stand it.  George thought the music might do him good—said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris what it was like. Harris said he would rather have the headache.

if my name was on a serious work like this it would never get fair treatment. They would all say I had tried to be funny and failed.

ma, già, ogni cosa ha i suoi difetti, come disse quel tale quando gli morì la suocera e dovette pagare le spese dei funerali.

It all comes of being so attractive, as the old lady said when she was struck by lightning.

stove, and crowd round that. Rainwater is the chief article of diet at supper.  The bread is two-thirds rainwater, the beefsteak-pie is exceedingly rich in

everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses. George

Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.