“It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.”
“I could not tread these perilous paths in safety, if I did not keep a saving sense of humor.”
“Any man who has had the job I've had and didn't have a sense of humor wouldn't still be here.”
“Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law.”
“Get well cards have become so humorous that if you don't get sick you're missing half the fun.”
“Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.”
“The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.”
“It is the saying of an ancient sage that humor was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor.”
“I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?”
“A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs-jolted by every pebble in the road.”
“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.”
“One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.”
“Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Imagination was given man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for what he is.”
“If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”