Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.
I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.
The secret to humor is surprise.
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.
Imagination was given man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs-jolted by every pebble in the road.
We never respect those who amuse us, however we may smile at their comic powers.
We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.
Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.
Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.
Humor is just another defense against the universe.
A rich man's joke is always funny.
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.
The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.
Comedy is a tragedy plus time.
True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.
In the end, everything is a gag.
Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law.
People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.
Levity is often less foolish and gravity less wise than each of them appears.
A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.
Burt Reynolds once asked me out. I was in his room.
The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.
A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.
— Fredrich
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.
Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.
A jest often decides matters of importance more effectual and happily than seriousness.
— Horace
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.
An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.
I am a great friend to public amusements, for they keep the people from vice.
There is always some frivolity in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, but also stray.
WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.
Humor, a good sense of it, is to Americans what manhood is to Spaniards and we will go to great lengths to prove it. Experiments with laboratory rats have shown that, if one psychologist in the room laughs at something a rat does, all of the other psychologists in the room will laugh equally. Nobody wants to be left holding the joke.
Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the healing-power gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.
Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.
The hall-mark of American humor is its pose of illiteracy.
One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.
The happiness or unhappiness of men depends as much on their humors as on fortune.
Fortune and humor govern the world.
If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
A person who knows how to laugh at himself will never ceased to be amused.
Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.
Comedy may be big business but it isn't pretty.
It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.
Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.
Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.
I could not tread these perilous paths in safety, if I did not keep a saving sense of humor.
Even the gods love jokes.
— Plato
There are things of deadly earnest that can only be mentioned under the cover of a joke.
One never needs their humor as much a when they argue with a fool.
A poor joke must invent its own laughter.
The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh
Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.
Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.
Humor is, I think, the sublets and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers
Anyone without a sense of humor is at the mercy of everyone else.
Humor has been a fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way through the national life, holding tenaciously to the spread elements of that life. Its mode has often been swift and coarse and ruthless, beyond art and beyond established civilization. It has engaged in warfare against the established heritage, against the bonds of pioneer existence. Its objective --the unconscious objective of a disunited people --has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of a society and the rounded completion of an American type.
Good humor isn't a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.
Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.
It is the saying of an ancient sage that humor was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor.
The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jokes and his imagination for his facts.
Be simple in words, manners, and gestures. Amuse as well as instruct. If you can make a man laugh, you can make him think and make him like and believe you.
The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.
— Socrates
Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.
A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball.
What some people invent the rest enlarge.
By blood a king, in heart a clown.
As a person is so must you humor them.
— Terence
Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people --that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.
Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
Any man who has had the job I've had and didn't have a sense of humor wouldn't still be here.
The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.
Humor -- the perfect relationship of the parts to the whole.
Humor is a whisper from the soul, imploring mind and body to relax, let go and be at peace again.
Isn't it sad how some people can't be funny, so they have to settle for being obnoxious?
Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth -- a sense of humor.
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?
It's hard to be funny when you have to be clean.
Where ever you find humor, you find pathos close by it side.
If you can make a woman laugh you can do anything with her.
Get well cards have become so humorous that if you don't get sick you're missing half the fun.
Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.
Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.