There is scarcely an aspect of the American character to which humor is not related, few which in some sense it has not governed. ... It is a lawless element, full of surprises.

In comedy, reconcilement with life comes at the point when to the tragic sense only an inalienable difference or dissension with life appears.

In a sense the whole American comic tradition had been that of social criticism.

Whole phases of comedy have become empty; the comic rejoinder has become every man's tool.

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

There is scarcely an aspect of the American character to which humor is not related, few which in some sense it has not governed. ... It is a lawless element, full of surprises.

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.