Quotes About Humor

I compare Stephen Sondheim with humor, because humor is unanalyzable. You can't analyze humor. You just have to get through it.

Humor is hard, hard, hard. And if you fail with humor, you don't fail halfway. You drop the ball humor-wise and everyone notices.

Every American, to the last man, lays claim to a "sense" of humor and guards it as his most significant spiritual trait, yet rejects humor as a contaminating element wherever found. America is a nation of comics and comedians; nevertheless, humor has no stature and is accepted only after the death of the perpetrator.

I love mixing humor and terror, or humor and exhaustion, or even humor and despair. I'm dealing right now with a loved one with cancer, and she's of course sad, but also telling the most disturbingly morbid jokes and puns. I love that, there's so much humanity in being able to mock fate and hardship.

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.

My humor was kind of from my dad and all the stuff that we went through, which was a lot of death. My humor was an escape.

Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

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.

My wife has a keen sense of humor. The more I humor her, the better.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

There's a tricky tone where you try to get some humor into a movie that's also a tough tale of murder and revenge. You have to ice skate rather carefully between the humor and the action tension part of the drama.

I was always kind of finding humor to be an access point to the conversation, to a pain relief, if you will. My mother was in a wheelchair since I was very young, so she was in pain and we used humor.

Among other things I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit. So here we are several billion of us, crowded into our global concentration camp for the duration. How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don't have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves.

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.

To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.

Short people have long faces, and long people have short faces. Big people have little humor, and little people have no humor at all.

But he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.

Anxiety and hostility seem to be a great part of good and bad humor. Examining humor too closely does seem to destroy it.

My humor came from seeing my parents have sex, smoke weed, my mom being naked - just weird hippie stuff, twisted R-rated humor.

Humor is widely used by Indians to deal with life. Indian gatherings are marked by laughter and jokes, many directed at the horrors of history, at the continuing impact of colonization, and at the biting knowledge that living as an exile in one's own land necessitates. . . . Certainly the time frame we presently inhabit has much that is shabby and tricky to offer; and much that needs to be treated with laughter and ironic humor.

Anger and humor are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to oppression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury.

Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have.

Senses of humor define people, as factions, deeper rooted than religious or political opinions. When carrying out everyday tasks, opinions are rather easy to set aside, but those whom a person shares a sense of humor with are his closest friends. They are always there to make the biggest influence.

I like to deal with EVERY aspect of our condition, and that means terror and humor in equal mix. Some books have more room for humor than others.

I actually pay careful attention to that sort of thing - infusing humor into my films - because that's how important I think humor is.

Humor is necessary - it allows the reader to come up for air before dunking them under again. I need humor and I need it on the page to keep the reader going.

Among animals, one has a sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.

What I didn't really understand, but then I thought this makes perfect sense, as well - was how many people responded to it by being like, "It was just so nice to take a break." Because even the humor - the great stuff that Samantha Bee and John Oliver and Seth Meyers are doing - it's all anger humor. And for somebody to say, "Hey, we're all idiots," and just be able to laugh at ourselves and be able to connect through that. It's always about connecting with someone, never about scolding them. The only thing I knew right upfront is we're not going after [Donald] Trump supporters.

My comedy has no color, it's for everybody, black, white, Latino, Asian. It's not a pro-black show, not a def jam show; it's just straight, wholesome type of humor.

A sense of humor is regarded as a sign of mental health - apart from excessive punning, which is another matter entirely.

Today's business and health care climate may not be pleasant. Cutbacks, pay cuts and layoffs do not make anyone's job easy. But that does not mean that the humor need stop.

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

I have a really dark, rich, thick sense of humor.

Cancer is probably the most unfunny thing in the world, but I'm a comedian, and even cancer couldn't stop me from seeing the humor in what I went through.

Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it.

I was working in this very bombastic style. I didn't really know about style. I didn't think about it: I did what I was interested in, what I was attracted to, what I was drawn to. I was drawn to color, and I was drawn to humor, and I was drawn to sexuality and spontaneity. It was all really intuitive. I never really thought, "Well this is the style...

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 overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

It takes time to develop a sense of humor, shared world views.

When your spinal cord freezes up, you're vulnerable to everything. But he [Chrestopher Reese] was tough as nails. And he kept a great, kind of dark sense of humor about it, but also was able to accomplish amazing things.

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

I'm not an advocate of true rhymes, I don't think. I think that everyone who writes musical theater needs to know how to do true rhymes, because that's the tradition of it, but I do think that in order for the art form to grow, it's important to not let tradition get in the way of innovation. There's all kinds of reasons not to use true rhyme in a lyric, like with off-color humor.

To me, being funny is more important than making a point, but I don't know. Most politicians are so interested in making points that they don't ... I'd rather be funny myself, and I'd rather listen to somebody with a little sense of humor.

Many animal rescue organizations hit with a hard-core, heartbreaking message. Their videos and stories can become difficult for average people to watch. By taking a more positive, heartwarming approach to animal rescue, I've been able to engage people and keep them engaged for years. Instead of selling the agony and misery - and sadly, there is no shortage of that - I start with the happy endings. I work backwards so the first message they get is joy and success due to their involvement. Opening the mind with humor and joy gets the rescue message in that much deeper.

Sometimes you want to have a talk about race, about police violence. It's very hard to get through to somebody. Everyone's got their side staked out. They don't want to talk about it. But you can break the ice with a little humor.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

If you stop and think about it, nearly all great humor is at the expense of someone or something.