Quotes About Humor

An interesting difference between African-American humor and Jewish humor, in it's kind of basic or maybe most austere type form is, African-American humor, some of it comes out of playing the dozens in which you insult the other person or insult the other person's mother, and so much of Jewish humor is like, you're insulting yourself. It's totally self-deprecating.

God has a tremendous sense of humor! Religion remains something dead without a sense of humor as a foundation to it. God would not have been able to create the world if he had no sense of humor. God is not serious at all. Seriousness is a state of disease; humor is health. Love, laughter, life, they are aspects of the same energy.

. . .a sense of humor can be a great help-particularly a sense of humor about (oneself). William Howard Taft joked about his own corpulence and people loved it; took nothing from his inherent dignity. Lincoln eased tense moments with bawdy stories, and often poked fun at himself-and history honors him for this human quality. A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

You know what make me laugh? Good, clean, honest humor. Not-trying-to-be-funny humor. Like Will Ferrell. Will Ferrell got that kind of humor.

Dali Lama said, 'when you open the heart of the person with humor, you can tell him the most truth. But if you tell him truth without humor, the heart closes.'

Sometimes I do readings and people can’t stop laughing, but I’m reading about pretty tragic things. I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course, Russians. It’s despair - just keep laughing, until you are dead.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

If you can't joke about the most horrendous things in the world, what's the point of jokes? What's the point in having humor? Humor is to get us over terrible things.

Each time we had a visiting writer, I asked what she thought of women and humor. By the end of the year, I had perfected my question and asked Adrienne Rich why there was so little written about women and humor. She looked at me right in the eye and said, 'You write it.' I took that as an order.

You know what make me laugh? Good, clean, honest humor. Not-trying-to-be-funny humor.

There's a combination of things [to survive the road trip]. Humor would be key. If everyone has relatively the same sense of humor, then that helps. And things in common, like food, eating.

How can you feel like an actual member of society casting a vote for a president when in a professional interview you said that farts make you laugh? And you're a professional in comedy? But then, have you ever seen a video of a small dog that farts? Welp. I don't need to explain that anymore. If you can't see the humor in that, good luck being a CEO somewhere where I'm not going to understand you. It's a harmless thing to laugh at. It's humor that's not at the expense of someone else. And it's silly. It's juvenile.

I'm really interested in the link between creativity and humor because humor is a type of creativity, and I do think that humorous people and humorous health helps creativity.

Humor is a bit like Mary Poppins' sugar-it helps the medicine go down. A little bit of humor allows people to think about very difficult subjects.

I don't think that there's necessarily a side to drama that has to be completely bleak. You have to have a flicker of humor 'cause everyone has a flicker of humor, something they find funny in life.

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 is a good way in general to get people together, I think. Of course, Danish humor is more ironic and sarcastic altogether.

I was interested in the mystical element of humor - was humor part of creation? Is God laughing at us, or with us?

Democrats, if they're smart and they're not brain-dead, are doing two things right now.They're having self-deprecating humor written for them. There was no humor in Cleveland. And they are not making this a Donald Trump.

I certainly didn't have New York Jewish humor. But I was in three Mel Brooks films so people thought I was a connoisseur of New York Jewish humor.

Theater roles are written by the great masters. The greatest literature that you can possibly know are the theater roles like King Lear, Hamlet, and all of those great roles. So all you do is you dive into these unchallenged roles and see how far you can get, what kind of accolades you can get, and how good you can be in them. In movie roles, you can actually improve them by knowing a lot about your own stage technique, which helps a great deal in the cinema and how you can project inner humor even though the particular dialogue is not necessarily funny, but you can infuse it with humor.

What you want in an interview is four things: You want someone who can explain what they do very well, who can have a sense of humor and hopefully is self - deprecating, who has a bit of a chip on their shoulder, and passion. If you have passion, a chip on the shoulder, a sense of humor, and you can explain what you do very well, it doesn't matter if you're a plumber or a singer or a politician. If you have those four things, you are interesting.

For instance, our music, They Might Be Giants, has this element of humor, which is probably the most uptight part of what we include in our music, because we're in part very self-conscious guys, and we want our music to stand up to the test of time, not just be visceral comedy records. We love humor and comedy, but there's this aspect to it that runs counter to what is included in most music.

My dad's sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal - his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.

But if you don't watch me, I will try and sneak in some humor. I see humor everywhere in life around me.

No one would have been invited to dinner so often as Jesus was unless he were interesting and had a sense of humor.

I have never believed much in luck, and my sense of humor has tended to walk on the dark side.

Humor is an amazing way to talk people down off a ledge.

There were times where I felt I was pressing a little bit too hard with the humor, and I had to pull back, because the overriding concern of the book was to create this disease that had no cure and make you pay attention to every emotional stage of what happens.

I come from a long ago era where men could be men and stereotypical humor didn't offend anybody.

Bands from Akron have a sense of humor and don't tend to take themselves too seriously.

The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks. If my daughter has a mediocre sense of humor, I'm just gonna tell her, "Be a staff writer for a sitcom. Because they'll have to hire you, they can't really fire you, and you don't have to produce that much. It'll be awesome."

The deeper the pit, the more humor you need to dig yourself out of it.

I don't really know. I think the first test is when you're very little and you fart, and you laugh at it and so do your friends and family. I knew before I was funny I was very annoying so I have that covered. I think it was because I was not very good in school I used humor as a defense mechanism. When I started doing plays and stuff at school I decided that I was going to keep doing it until someone tells me to stop and get a real job.

I think there were moments on Snow White where I wished there was a little bit more of a sick humor toward Ravenna. But maybe the tone of the movie couldn't really support that. So you always have to kind of figure out where you are and adapt to it.

Some sarcasm is best told simply. Some humor is best told big and some is best told small.

You feel like telling him you're not single in the way that he thinks you're single. After all, you have yourself. I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.

But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.

At the top of the list of what makes a successful marriage, is a sense of humor.

Men of humor are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, amongst other gifts, possess wit, as Shakespeare.

As a theatrical troupe, the Muppets haven't exactly been AWOL these past dozen years; the gang rocked YouTube in 2009 with their kick-ass rendition of Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' But they've certainly been lying low while our twitchy, tweet-y times have favored snarkier, more air-quote-driven entertainment, even from puppets. And in a way, that showbiz hiatus has worked in favor of The Muppets. For adults, the movie's gentle, clever, unironic humor feels freshly, trendily retro now, enhanced by laughs provided in cameos from a very up-to-date roster of stars.

I love the diversity of America. I love the plain, normal sense of humor Americans have. It is not wicked, like in some countries. And I also love how new America is.

The joke of it all is that you are looking from your true nature right now without knowing it. If you would stop being fascinated with the contents of your mind, you would experience what I am saying. Feel your way into what I am saying rather than thinking about it. Only a self-concept looks and longs for God. Drop your self-concept and there is only God meeting God. Enlightenment is the restoration of cosmic humor.

He was just trying to tease me - I knew that later - but he said he'd have to leave because it wasn't fair to have anyone in the room who was going to make fun of what he had to say. He had a good sense of humor, really.

Even as a kid I was never the generator of humor, but I always knew who was funny, who to hang out with.

The thing to remember is that children are temporary. As soon as they develop a sense of humor and get to be good company, maybe even remember to take the trash out and close the refrigerator door, they pack up their electronic equipment and their clothes, and some of your clothes, and leave in a U-Haul, to return only at Thanksgiving.

The minute you celebrate narcissism, which on one hand is very complex, it's very ridiculous. You have to love oneself with humor.

I've had a very laughable career and what has seen me through is my sense of humor.