quotations about humor
Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Humour and Humanity
We have imagination to compensate us for what we aren't, and a sense of humor to console us for what we are.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you.
LARRY GELBART
attributed, Phillips' Treasury of Humorous Quotations
Humor is just another defense against the universe.
MEL BROOKS
attributed, The Ultimate Book of Quotations
There are few advantages, I'll tell you, that profit a man more than humor. Humor will draw a crowd. Humor will calm a mob or reassure a nursery school.
GENE WOLFE
The Shadow of the Torturer
The most perfect humour and irony is generally quite unconscious.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Life and Habit
The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.
EDWARD ALBEE
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything.
MARTIN AMIS
"Failures of Tolerance", Experience
All great humorists are sad.... I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest--the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Defence Remains Open!"
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it. Of course, you laugy by proxy. You're really laughing at the other guy's lacks, not your own.
LANGSTON HUGHES
prefatory note, The Book of Negro Humor
Humor is what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your own unconscious therapy.
LANGSTON HUGHES
prefatory note, The Book of Negro Humor
Many a woman goes on a diet and loses nothing but her sense of humor.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.
E. B. WHITE & KATHARINE S. WHITE
"The Preaching Humorist", The Saturday Review of Literature, October 18, 1941
The sense of humor is the only one of man's senses that doesn't always make sense.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
I think humor springs from rage, hay fever, overdue rent and miscellaneous hell.
WILL CUPPY
letter to Max Eastman, 1936
Until two weeks ago I might have taken my pen in hand to write about humour with the confident air of an acknowledged professional. But that time is past. Such claim as I had has been taken from me. In fact I stand unmasked. An English reviewer writing in a literary journal, the very name of which is enough to put contradiction to sleep, has said of my writing, "What is there, after all, in Professor Leacock's humour but a rather ingenious mixture of hyperbole and myosis?" The man was right. How he stumbled upon this trade secret I do not know. But I am willing to admit, since the truth is out, that it has long been my custom in preparing an article of a humorous nature to go down to the cellar and mix up half a gallon of myosis with a pint of hyperbole. If I want to give the article a decidedly literary character, I find it well to put in about half a pint of paresis. The whole thing is amazingly simple.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Feast of Stephen
The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.
MARK TWAIN
"How to Tell a Story"
Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humor, the writing is on the wall.
ALAN BENNETT
attributed, Phillips' Treasury of Humorous Quotations
A prig is a pompous fool who has gone out for a ceremonial walk, and without knowing it has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humour.
ARNOLD BENNETT
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Humor is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.
CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
attributed, The Hidden Souls of Words