Quotations about Humor

Humor is a reminder that no matter how high the throne one sits on, one sits on one's bottom. ~Taki


Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs. ~Christopher Morley


Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn. ~Irvin S. Cobb


Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. ~Francis Bacon


Humor results when society says you can't scratch certain things in public, but they itch in public. ~Tom Walsh


Humor has a way of bringing people together. It unites people. In fact, I'm rather serious when I suggest that someone should plant a few whoopee cushions in the United Nations. ~Ron Dentinger


Every survival kit should include a sense of humor. ~Author Unknown


Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place. ~Mark Twain


Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity. ~James Thurber


Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. ~William James


After God created the world, He made man and woman. Then, to keep the whole thing from collapsing, He invented humor. ~Bill Kelly, "Mordillo"


If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. ~Mahatma Gandhi


The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance. ~Peter De Vries


Humor is just another defense against the universe. ~Mel Brooks


Humor is reason gone mad. ~Groucho Marx


A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. ~Peter Ustinov


Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end. ~Sid Caesar


Warning: Humor may be hazardous to your illness. ~Ellie Katz


Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that humor excites in those who lack it. ~George Saintsbury


Humor is... despair refusing to take itself seriously. ~Arland Ussher


Humor is a rubber sword - it allows you to make a point without drawing blood. ~Mary Hirsch


The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes. ~William Davis


Many a true word is spoken in jest. ~English Proverb


I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it. ~Frank A. Clark


Above all else: go out with a sense of humor. It is needed armor. Joy in one's heart and some laughter on one's lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life. ~Hugh Sidey


There is no defense against adverse fortune which is so effectual as an habitual sense of humor. ~Thomas W. Higginson


Let your humour always be good-humour, in the double sense of the phrase: if it comes from a bad humour, it is almost sure to be bad humour. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Humor prevents one from becoming a tragic figure even though he/she is involved in tragic events. ~E.T. "Cy" Eberhart


Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully. ~Max Eastman


A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs - jolted by every pebble in the road. ~Henry Ward Beecher


There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth. ~Victor Borge, London Times, 3 January 1984


Someone once defined humor as a way to keep from killing yourself. I keep my sense of humor and I stay alive. ~Abe Burrows


Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him. ~Roman Gary


Humor is, I think, the subtlest 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. ~Leo Rosten