Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
~ Virginia Woolf
The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
~ John Updike
The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.
~ Charles Lamb
He that jokes confesses.
~ Italian Proverb
There are things of deadly earnest that can only be safely mentioned under cover of a joke.
~ J. J. Procter
Humour is the only test of gravity and gravity of humour for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.
~ Aristotle
Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.
~ Will Rogers
A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people.
~ Peter Mcarthur
Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.
~ James Thurber
The best definition of humour I know is: humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof. I think this is the best I know because I wrote it myself.
~ Stephen Leacock
A humorist is a man who feels bad but who feels good about it.
~ Don Herold
Humour plays close to the big hot fire which is the truth and the reader feels the heat.
~ E. B. White
Wit is the only wall Between us and the dark.
~ Mark Van Doren
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
~ Mel Brooks
Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration.
~ Henry Ward Beecher
Novelist Peter de Vries like Adlai Stevenson and Mark Twain has suffered from the American assumption that anyone with a sense of humour is not to be taken seriously.
~ Timothy Foote
Humour can be dissected as a frog can but the thing dies in the process.
Humour is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.
~ Christian Morgenstern
The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
~ Alfred North Whitehead
Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.
~ Karl Barth
Humour is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention. But it has no persuasive value at all.
~ J. K. Galbraith
Humour is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot.
~ Robert Frost
A comedian is a fellow who finds other comedians too humorous to mention.
~ Jack Herbert
If it's sanity you're after There's no recipe like Laughter. Laugh it off.
~ Henry Rutherford Elliot
Humour is an affirmation of dignity a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
~ Romain Gary
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
~ Peter Ustinov
Comedy is tragedy - plus time.
~ Carol Burnett
Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
~ Joseph Conrad
The ability to laugh at life is right at the top with love and communication in the hierarchy of our needs. Humour has much to do with pain it exaggerates the anxieties and absurdities we feel so that we gain distance and through laughter relief.
~ Sara Davidson
He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh.
~ The Koran
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
~ Victor Borge
You encourage a comic man too much and he gets silly.
Any man will admit if need be that his sight is not good or that he cannot swim or shoots badly with a rifle but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him mortal affront.
Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.
Wit is far more often a shield than a lance.
~ Anonymous
If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist - I feel like countering with the word seriousist.
~ Peter De Vries
A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it never in the tongue Of him that makes it.
~ William Shakespeare
Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.
~ Aldous Huxley
Humour is just another defence against the universe.
The great humorist forgets himself in his delighted contemplation of other people.
~ Douglas Bush
