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HUMOR

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[QUOTES FOLLOW LINKS]

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JACK BENNY

BUGS BUNNY, BUMPER STICKERS

BURMA SHAVE, BURNS & ALLEN

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COMEDY

W.C. FIELDS

FUNNY

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OGDEN NASH

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SENSE OF HUMOR

THE SIMPSONS

WIT


I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The
latter I consider as an act, the former as an habit of
mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed
and permanent.
--Joseph Addison (1672—1719)
English essayist, poet, and dramatist.
_The Spectator_, #381 [17 May 1712]

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common
denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them
make me laugh.
--W.H. [Wystan Hugh] Auden (1907—1973)
English-born poet and man of letters.
_The Dyer's Hand_ [1962], "Notes on the Comic"

Nothing makes your sense of humor disappear faster
than having someone ask where it is.
--Ivern Ball

The marvellous thing about a joke with a double
meaning is that it can only mean one thing.
--Ronnie Barker (1929—2005)
English television comedian, writer, and actor.

Humor helps us to think out of the box. The average
child laughs about 400 times per day, the average
adult laughs only 15 times per day. What happened to
the other 385 laughs?--Humor is that which most
efficiently recognizes that we are living in an
imperfect world, with imperfect arguments and things
that are insane, illogical, and irrational. And the
only way we can live with that fact is to laugh.
--J. Barsoux

I make myself laugh at everything, for fear
of having to weep at it.
--Pierre de Beaumarchais (1732—1799)
French playwright and adventurer.
_The Barber of Seville_ [1775]

Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in
it. Grim care, moroseness, anxiety--all this rust of
life--ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth.
--Henry Ward Beecher (1813—1887)
American Congregational minister;
[brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, son of Lyman Beecher].

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of
humorless people.
--Robert Benchley (1889—1945)
American humorist and newspaper columnist.

The world would not be in such a snarl
If Marx had been Groucho instead of Karl.
--Irving Berlin (1888—1989)
American songwriter.
Birthday message to Groucho Marx, quoted in
Groucho Marx _The Grouch Phile_ [1976].

Humor is just another defense against the universe.
--Mel Brooks (1926— )
American actor, writer, and director.

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the
whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd
be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.
--Lenny Bruce [Leonard Alfred Schneider] (1925—1966)
American comedian.
"Performing and the Art of Comedy", John Cohen ed.,
_The Essential Lenny Bruce_ [1967].


^^

Carol Burnett (1934— )
American actress.

Climbing out of a cab one day, Miss Burnett inadvertently caught her coat in
the door. As the driver continued on his way, unaware of the accident, the
comedienne was obliged to run alongside the moving vehicle to avoid being
pulled off her feet.

A quick-thinking passerby, noticing her plight, hailed the cab and alerted the
driver. Having realeased Miss Burnett's coat, the driver asked her anxiously,
"Are you all right?"

"Yes," she replied, still gasping for breath, "but how much more do I owe you?"

--_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_
edited by Clifton Fadiman and Andrι Bernard [2000 ed.]

^^

Men will confess to treason, murder, arson,
false teeth, or a wig. How many of them
will own up to a lack of humor?
--Frank Moore Colby (1865—1925)
American essayist and professor.
_The Colby Essays_ [1926]

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on
the affections.
--George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] (1819—1880)
English novelist.
_Daniel Deronda_ [1876], Book 2, Chapter 15

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few
people are interested and the frog dies of it.
--W. C. Fields [William Claude Dukenfield]
(1880—1946) American vaudeville star and film actor.
In Robert L. Taylor _W. C. Fields, Rowdy King of Comedy_.

-

Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had
my share. But whatever happens to you, you have
to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final
analysis, you [must remember] to laugh.
--Katharine Hepburn (1907—2003)
American stage and motion-picture actress;
winner of four Academy Awards.


I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.
--Katharine Hepburn (1907—2003)
American stage and motion-picture actress;
winner of four Academy Awards.

-

All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.
--Hermann Hesse (1877—1962)
German novelist, poet, and winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.
_Reflections_ [ed. Volker Michels 1974]

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same
thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor
is just common sense, dancing.
--Clive [Vivian] James (1939— )
Expatriate Australian writer, poet, and critic.

-

I did not intend to write a funny book, at first. I did not know
I was a humorist. I have never been sure about it. In the
middle ages, I should probably have gone about preaching
and got myself burned or hanged.
--Jerome K Jerome (1859—1927)
English novelist and playwright.
_My Life and Times_


I think I may claim to have been, for the first twenty
years of my career, the best abused author in England.
_Punch_ invariably referred to me as ' 'Arry K 'Arry',
and would then proceed to solemnly lecture me on the
sin of mistaking vulgarity for humour and impertinence
for wit. ... Max Beerbohm was always very angry with me.
The _Standard_ spoke of me as a menace to English letters.

...At the opening dinner of the Krasnapolski restaurant
in Oxford Street (now the Frascati), I was placed next
to Harold Frederick, just arrived from America. I noticed
that he had been looking at me with curiosity. 'Where's
your flint hammer?' he asked me suddenly. 'Left it in
the cloakroom?' He explained that he had visualized me
from reading the English literary journals, and had
imagined something prehistoric.

--Jerome K Jerome (1859—1927)
English novelist and playwright.
_My Life and Times_

-

I have observed that in comedies the best actor plays the droll, while
some scrub rogue is made the fine gentleman or hero. Thus it is in
the farce of life. Wise men spend their time in mirth; it is only fools
who are serious.
--Henry Saint John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678—1751)
English politician and philosopher.

Who lives without folly is not so wise as he thinks.
--Franηois de La Rochefoucauld (1613—1680)
French classical author.
_Maxims [1678], Maxim 209

Nobody says you must laugh, but a sense of humor
can help you overlook the unattractive, tolerate
the unpleasant, cope with the unexpected, and
smile through the day.
--Ann Landers [Esther Pauline Friedman Lederer]
(1918—2002) Advice columnist.

But the deep background that lies behind and beyond
what we call humor is revealed only to the few who,
by instinct or by effort, have given thought to it.
The world's humor, in its best and greatest sense,
is perhaps the highest product of our civilization.
Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by
life itself: the strange incongruity between our
aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful
anxieties of today that fade into nothingness tomorrow,
the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened
in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back
upon the course that has been traversed,we pass in
view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age
may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry
quarrels of their childhood. And here, in its larger
aspect, humor is blended with pathos till the two are
one, and represent, as they have in every age, the
mingled heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot
on earth.
--Stephen Butler Leacock (1869—1944)
Canadian humorist.

-

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized
by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
--Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742—1799)
German scientist and drama critic.
_Aphorisms_ [1765—1799], aphorism 46

One morning I shot an elephant in my
pajamas. How he got in my pajamas,
I'll never know.
--Groucho [Julius Henry] Marx (1895—1977)
American film comedian.
"Animal Crackers" [1930 film]

-

Reader's Digest:

If you could go back in time and meet, say, the
12-year-old Paul McCartney, what advice would you
give him?

Paul McCartney:

Oh, my God. What would I tell him? Keep a good
sense of humor, man. You're going to need it.
And enjoy yourself. Because, you know, we don't
know how long we're here for.

--Reader's Digest [November 2001],
"Getting Better All The Time"

-

There are several recognizable types of humorous
activity. There is parody, when you make fun of
people who are smarter than you; satire, when
you make fun of people who are richer than you;
and burlesque, when you make fun of both while
taking your clothes off.
--P.J. O'Rourke (1947— )
American political satirist.

There are those who, in their pride and their innocence,
dedicate their careers to writing humorous pieces. Poor
dears, the world is stacked against them from the start,
for everybody in it has the right to look at their work
and say, `I don't think that's funny.'
--Dorothy Parker (1893—1967)
American critic and humorist.

Mere seriousness does not get down to the root of things,
and...a spirit of fun, of irony and of humour often digs
deeper and seems to get more easily -because more
playfully - down to the truth.
--Hugo Rahner

-

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a
deeper and less friendly understanding.
--Agnes Repplier (1855—1950)
American author.


People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity
are very much in the way of civilization.
--Agnes Repplier (1855—1950)
American author.
_In Pursuit of Laughter_ [1936]

-

Those who shun the whimsy of things will
experience rigor mortis before death.
--Tom Robbins (1936— )
American author.
_Still Life with Woodpecker_ [1980]

Everything is funny as long as it
is happening to Somebody Else.
--Will Rogers [William Penn Adair Rogers] (1879—1935)
American humorist and actor.
_The Illiterate Digest_ [1924]

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at
every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction
of what it is pretending to be. But as it nevertheless
intends all the time to be something dignified, at the
next moment it corrects and checks and tries to cover
up the absurd thing it was; so that a conventional world,
a world of masks, is superimposed on the reality, and
passes in every sphere of human interest for the reality
itself. Humor is the perception of this illusion, whilst
the convention continues to be maintained, as if we had
not observed its absurdity.
--George Santayana (1863—1952)
Spanish-born philosopher and critic.

I have often noticed that a kindly, placid good-
humor is the companion of longevity, and, I
suspect, frequently the leading cause of it.
--Sir Walter Scott (1771—1832)
Scottish novelist and poet.
In John Gibson Lockhart
_Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott_ , p. 593 [1901].

Good humor is one of the best articles of
dress one can wear in society.
--William Makepeace Thackeray (1811—1863)
English novelist.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist
makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun
of himself.
--James Thurber (1894—1961)
American humorist and cartoonist.
In Loyal Jones & Billy Edd Wheeler
_Hometown Humor_, p. 13 [1999].

Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess
humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.
--Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852—1917)
English actor-manager.
In Hesketh Pearson _Beerbohm-Tree_ [1956], ch. 12.

Humor is tragedy plus time.
--Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835—1910)
American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot.

Nature has made us frivolous to console
us for our miseries.
--Voltaire (Franηois Marie Arouet) (1694—1778)
French writer and philosopher.

A sense of humor can help you overlook
the unattractive, tolerate the unpleasant,
cope with the unexpected, and smile
through the unbearable.
--Moshe Waldoks

I love such mirth as does not make friends ashamed
to look upon one another next morning.
--Izaak Walton (1593—1683)
English writer.
_The Compleat Angler_ [1653]

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking
than a sense of humor for it takes irony to appreciate
the joke which is on oneself.
--Jassamyn West (1902—1984)
American novelist and screenwriter.

Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves
about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense
of humor.
--E.B. [Elwyn Brooks] White (1899—1985)
American essayist and literary stylist.
"Some Remarks on Humor"
_The Second Tree from the Corner_ [1954]

-

Imagination was given to man to compensate him
for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided
to console him for what he is.
--attributed to many

Humor encompassed the entire Marx brothers' family.
"Because we were a kid act, we traveled at half-fare,
despite the fact that we were all around twenty,"
Groucho once recalled. "Minnie [their mother] insisted
we were thirteen... "'That kid of yours is in the
dining car smoking a cigar,' the conductor told her.
'And another one is in the washroom shaving.' Minnie
shook her head sadly. 'They grow so fast!'"
--anon

The only way to amuse some people is to
slip and fall on an icy pavement.
--anon.

----

droll (adjective) ['drol]
Quaintly amusing, mischievously facetious,
exhibiting the qualities of a droll.

facetious (adj.) [fκ-'see-shκs]
Humorous or meant to be humorous but
actually mildly sarcastic or slightly
inappropriate.

flippant [FLIP-uhnt], adjective:
Lacking proper seriousness or respect; showing
inappropriate levity; pert.
Ex.: The conversations had grown more adult over
the years--she was less flippant, at least.
--Sylvia Brownrigg,
_The Metaphysical Touch_

jocular (adj.)
1. fond of joking: with a playful joking disposition
2. humorous: intended to be funny

ribald [RIB-uhld; RY-bawld], adjective:
1. Characterized by or given to vulgar humor; coarse.
2. A ribald person; a lewd fellow.


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