Quotes About Humor

The only writer who gives me unfeigned pleasure is P.G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over Sunset at Blandings.

The English feel schadenfreude even about themselves.

As for me, I'm a gurgling wizard of calorific excess.

Lizzyboo digs me, which is just as well, because if she wants to find the way to my heart she's going to need a fucking shovel. She's going to need to dig up London Fields.

Consider the Jewish joke, with the old lady running distractedly along the seashore: Help! My son the doctor is drowning. Amusing, I suppose. Her pride, I suppose, is amusing: it is greater than her love.

I attended a breakfast meeting with Fielding...half way through...the cork of nausea abruptly popped in my throat. I only just made it to the adjacent can, which was large and acoustical; my imitation of an exploding hippopotamus came through the closed door in full quadraphonic. I got one or two funny glances on my return ..and if I were them, I'd enjoy the spectacle. It does my poor ticker good to see someone really totalled.

I will now take the chance to repeat my contention that the drama is handily inferior to the novel and the poem. Dramatists who have lasted more than a century include Shakespeare and – who else? One is soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian. Compare that to English poetry and its great waves of immortality. I agree that it is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright. I scream with laughter about it all the time. This is one of God's best jokes.

Here's another joke: "She calls me up and says, 'Get over here. There's nobody home.' So I get over there, and guess what. There's nobody home.

No. Tocqueville said that humour would be bred out of them by sheer diversity. Anything witty was bound to offend someone. He thought they'd reach the point where nobody'd dare say anything at all.

Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last, you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.

I wouldn't have minded a rather more detailed conclusion (to Pride and Prejudice) — say, a twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr. Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well.

Doctor Where's your mammy now? Johnny At home she is. (Pause.) Lying at the foot of me stairs. Doctor What's she doing lying at the foot of your stairs? Johnny Nothing. Just lying. Ah she seems happy enough. She has a pint with her. Doctor How did she get lying at the foot of your stairs? Johnny Be falling down them! How d'ya usually get lying at the foot of a fella's stairs? Doctor And you just left her there? Johnny Is it my job to go picking her up? Doctor It is!

I don't jog. It makes the ice jump right out of my glass.

The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your glass.

reason. Il n'y a pas des sots si incommodes que ceux qui ont de l'esprit!" "You see!" said Athelney Jones, reappearing down the steps

Il n'y a pas des sots si incommodes que ceux qui ont de l'esprit!

Arthur Conan Doyle

The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices. Scientific discovery, as we shall presently see, can be described in very similar terms-as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible.

Every good joke contains an element of the riddle-it may be childishly simple, or subtle and challenging-which the listener must solve. By doing so, he is lifted out of his passive role and compelled to co-operate, to repeat to some extent the process of inventing the joke, to re-create it in his imagination. The type of entertainment dished out by the mass media makes one apt to forget that true recreation is re-creation.

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.... All laughter then is occasioned by a paradox.... This, briefly stated, is the true explanation of the ludicrous.

Natura se amuza citeodata formind combinatii caraghioase. Sint unii care-ntr-una casca ochii la nimicuri si rid ca papagalii in fata unui simplu cintaret din cimpoi; iar altii au o infatisare asa de posomorita, incit nici macar n-ar suride auzind o gluma buna. Nu s-a spus adesea ca, in fond, spiritul cel mai limitat este cel mai fericit?

The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.

Ludzie zawsze s? gotowi do ?miechu, a ci, co si? ?miej?, s? po naszej stronie.