Quotes About Humor

but deep down he couldn't tell whether Nigel was joking or not. It was to become an increasingly familiar feeling over the next few years.

Do you work out, Michael? Attend a gym, or anything like that?' 'No. Why do you ask?' 'It's just that you have unusually firm buttocks. For a writer, that is. It was the first thing I noticed about you.

Where are the laughs in massacre, famine and climate change, exactly? What's so funny about the Middle East, North Korea and Afghanistan? Who's going to chuckle when they pick up the London Review of Books and find John Lanchester arguing, convincingly as always, that the banking habits of the British people pose a greater threat to their own security than terrorism?

Although he, like all people, secretely enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was somethig else. It was so bad as to seem evil in a moral way.

The perfect gift for the man who had everything was a quarter-ounce bottle of feminism.

Chip's sphincter had meanwhile dilated nearly to the degree of unconditional surrender.

Sex with a squirrel who had exciting breasts beneath her little-kid pajamas was not without its appeal

one benefit of being a depressive pessimist, which is the propensity to laugh in dark times.

So yes, he could be funny. If you thought such things were funny. And the coffee had to be made with a specific number of beans. He could taste any errors in arithmetic.

Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had ben taken from me, stripped off like clothes I'd only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.

Everything funny in a not-funny-at-all kind of way. Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines.

Mrs. Neverbody's Recipe for Making Crocodile Tears To a slice of hanky-panky Add some artificial cranky. Moisten well with canned boo-hoo. Flavor with a spoof or two. Drip this slowly—as it falls Roll it into little bawls. If you're careful, while they're cooling You can spread on only-fooling. (This recipe is not worthwhile Unless you are a crocodile.)

To tugboat was to try Minna's patience. Any time you pushed your luck, said too much, overstayed a welcome, or overestimated the usefulness of a given method or approach, you were guilty of having tugged the boat. Tugboating was most of all a dysfunction of wits and storytellers, and a universal one. Anybody who thought himself funny would likely tug a boat here or there. Knowing when a joke or verbal gambit was right at its limit, quitting before the boat had been tugged, that was art.

How's it feel to be a worthless jumbo diddly-ass puppetool?

SADNESS OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [ sic ]; Humor sadness; Sadness of love wit[hou]t release; Sadne[ss of be]ing smart; Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]; Sadness of having options; Sadness of wanting sadness; Sadness of confusion; Sadness of domes[tic]ated birds, Sadness of fini[shi]ng a book; Sadness of remembering; Sadness of forgetting; Anxiety sadness...

I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.

When you look up 'hilarious' in the dictionary, there's a picture of you.

This is the sixty-nine, I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers -- two of them -- on the action, so that he would not overlook it. Why is it dubbed sixty-nine? he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor. What did people do before 1969? Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus.

In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.

Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.

I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once. Huh? It said, 'Oeuf.' What is that? It's a joke. Do you want to hear another, or have you already had un oeuf?

I can be funny, because I have time to meditate about how to be funny, and I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes, and I can be a melancholy person in manners that are interesting, not only melancholy. With writing, we have second chances.

I decided then and there never to become someone who told jokes when explanations were impossible.