Quotes About Humor

The culture of the Epic Fail, in its rituals of comic sacrifice, is a culture of sublimated predation.

Motormouth: So this is love? Well, love is a gift and a lot of people forget that. So you two better brace yourselves for a whole lot of ugly coming your way on a never ending train of stupid. Penny: So you met my mom?

The thing is, my father has about as much rhythm as a drunken octopus […]

People say funny things all the time during really serious moments in life.

Humor is very very risky, particularly for a candidate, unless he's been in so long that it just doesn't matter, and he's not running for president. But it's just that people are so sensitive and so touchy, and you're just going to upset somebody without ever realizing it.

When somebody says to you, "The last thing I want to do is hurt you" what they really mean is, "It's on the list. I've just got some other things to do first."

What if you tell a joke in the forest, and nobody laughs, was it a joke? —Steven Wright To create your comedic MAPP, you start with the purpose.

The first part, the setup, sets the stage. The second half, the punch line, provides an unexpected ending. It's the surprising conclusion that causes laughter.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself. —James Thurber

Humor comes out of the unexpected: If there's no surprise, there's no laugh. In a triple, as discussed in chapter seven, the first two lines are often straight lines; this is the realistic element. The third line is the surprise twist—logically related to the first two lines, but unexpected and exaggerated. Realism is the setup, while exaggeration is the joke. "Get your facts first," wrote Mark Twain, "and then you can distort them as much as you please.

Even the gods love jokes. —Plato

The penis, when you pull the underwear down, it's like a drunk friend just falling out of a car. —Jo Koy

A key prerequisite to thinking and writing funny is understanding funny. And

Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of sense and nonsense.

As Mark Twain observed, "Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.

A joke is a curve ball—a pitch that bends at the last instant and fools the batter. "You throw a perfectly straight line at the audience and then, right at the end, you curve it. Good jokes do that," Burrows said. To achieve the unexpected twist, it's sometimes necessary to sacrifice grammar and even logic.

Comedy works best when an audience is not only prepared to laugh, but anxious to participate in a shared social experience. For release humor to work, the audience must be clued to every plot from the beginning. If the audience and the actor don't know what's behind the door, that's mystery. If the audience knows, but someone else doesn't, that's release comedy.

Regression Sigmund Freud's theory of humor contended that humor, like sleep, is therapeutic. But even more important, he argued, wit can express—in a relatively appropriate way—urges and feelings that can't otherwise be let loose, such as the desire to act on regressive infantile sexual or aggressive behavior. More to the point, Freud believed that a lack of humor can be a sign of mental illness.

Psychoanalysts learn a great deal about patients by listening to their humor. And you can learn a great deal about your own psychological makeup by constantly asking yourself (and answering truthfully), Why did I laugh at this joke and not at others?

Chemistry is the study of the composition, properties, and behavior of matter—humor writing is the study of the composition, properties, and behavior of funny. The atoms, or basic units, of humor writing are words. (The subatomic structures are letters or sounds.) These comedic atoms (words) form the elements known as jokes. Although there

Humor is more than entertainment or joke telling—it's a powerful social lubricant that eases and enriches communication, interpersonal relations, and education. Humor is a universal speech opener because it immediately earns the speaker respectful attention. It's psychologically impossible to hate someone with whom you've laughed. When we laugh, we temporarily give ourselves over to the person who makes us laugh. —Robert Orben

This need for hostility bred what is called nihilistic humor—humor based on the theory that there is no person or thing so sacred as to be beyond ridicule. Humorists, protected

Since it appears that exaggeration is the logical antithesis of realism, it may seem ludicrous to have both within the framework of one piece of humor. But good humor is a paradox—the unexpected juxtaposition of the reasonable next to the unreasonable—and that creates surprise. Think

Milton Berle and Bob Hope each had a vault containing more than six million jokes on index cards sorted by topic. The