Quotes About Humour

The British have turned their sense of humour into a national virtue. It is odd, because through much of history, humour has been considered cheap, and laughter something for the lower orders. But British aristocrats didn't care a damn about what people thought of them, so they made humour acceptable.

Probably there is an imperceptible touch of something permanent that one feels instinctively to adhere to true humour, whereas wit may be the mere conversational shooting up of "smartness"--a bright feather, to be blown into space the second after it is launched...Wit seems to be counted a very poor relation to Humour....Humour is never artificial.

A husband and wife should resolve never to wrangle with each other; never to bandy words or indulge in the least ill-humour. Never! I say; NEVER. Wrangling, even in jest, and putting on an air of ill-humour merely to tease, becomes earnest by practice.

We were a very funny family. Humour was the tool with which my brother and I tried to get attention. We were always trying to be the funniest.

A lot of humour is about just enjoying life and spontaneity and because you make a joke that puts somebody down - we're always teasing each other. It's with affection. It's nasty teasing that we - not all teasing; nasty teasing you cut out.

I refuse not to have a sense of humour.

Humour is completed by an audience.

Apparently, I have a totally different sense of humour.

My real name is Madeleine Wickham, under which I write dramas with an edge of humour. As Sophie Kinsella its fast, all-out comedies, such as the Shopaholic series.

It had to be hammered home quite a bit because I didn't see any humour in my life at all.

If you find a saint who has no sense of humour, then he is not a saint at all. Impossible. His very seriousness says that he has not achieved. Once you have some inner experiences of your own you become very playful, you become very innocent, childlike.

I always have humour in my action movies. I think characters that make jokes under fire are more real. It somehow helps put you in their shoes.

I love inappropriate humour. What else are you going to do? You have to laugh.

A good marriage is loving someone in a lot of different circumstances. Respect for them and their views and ideas and the life that they're leading with you. Shared values and interests. A good sense of humour. And a little volatility along the way.

Humour's the pay-off for all that existential horror.

It seems like it has kind of taken off where people are saying 'oh it's a female character' and it just kind of grew. But my intent in saying that was humour. You know, you have to show Link when you create a trailer for a Zelda announcement.

You've got to have a sense of humour about sex. When you look at it, it's all pretty ridiculous, isn't it?

When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

She had...the glimmerings of a sense of humour - which is simply another name for a sense of the fitness of things.

I don't mock things, which makes me more vulnerable to mockery myself. If you're cynical, you're protected from mockery. But I have to be nice. I don't think I have irony. A sense of humour, yes, but not irony.

I like someone with a really good and dark sense of humour.

It is not merely the brevity by which the haiku isolates a particular group of phenomena from all the rest; nor its suggestiveness, through which it reveals a whole world of experience. It is not only in its remarkable use of the season word, by which it gives us a feeling of a quarter of the year; nor its faint all-pervading humour. Its peculiar quality is its self-effacing, self-annihilative nature, by which it enables us, more than any other form of literature, to grasp the thing-in-itself.

The hall-mark of American humour is its pose of illiteracy.

I think you need humour and a sense of fun, which is what I try to bring to my books to leaven the danger and action. The ones that really transcend the genre always have a great laugh in them, such as 'Fright Night,' 'Lost Boys,' 'American Werewolf in London' - just to name a few.

In one sense, you put a lot of yourself into a small press - it's your personal tastes that are on the line - so when criticism is levelled it can feel personal. But, on the other hand, it can be very welcome and necessary. You're never entirely impervious, and one of the main benefits of being a small operation is that you can change the way you do things quickly in response to criticism. In all instances it pays to have a sense of humour and perspective.

I love to bring humour into my work. Because comedy is not a huge part of the art world. And big-business film takes itself very seriously.

The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn't just common to me; it's anybody who's funny.

I honestly thought my marriage would work because me and the wife did share a sense of humour. We had to really, because she didn't have one.

I think the key attributes for a good speaker are someone that's articulate and someone that puts a fair amount of humour into what they do.

My humour has always come from anger, but I have to make sure I don't just get angry and jump on a soapbox.

I would like, with the sun shining through the window on a crisp early-autumnal mid-morning, with a sufficiency of Monster Cappucino flowing in my veins to prompt minimal sentience, to declare my view for the record that Drummer Jokes are a cruel and pernicious form of humour introduced to the world by under-humoured persons lacking in sensitivity and concern for other drummers.

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.

I spent more time in America, but I developed a very English sense of humour. I clicked into it deeply with Peter Sellers, who is still probably my favourite comedian.

When I was in film school, it was said that all good films were characterised by some form of humour.

I like my man to be witty; he needs a sense of humour and needs to be extremely well-mannered.

Elderly people, I have found, when they're being honest, are also scumbags, and enjoy a little prurient humour as well.

Humour is like violence. They both come to you unexpectedly, and the more unpredictable they both are, the better it gets.

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

Once you have perceived that life is very cruel, the only response is to live with as much humanity, humour and freedom as you can.

You need to know where to go,' Sanya said. 'Yes,' 'And you are going to consult four large pizzas for guidance.' 'Yes,' I said. ...'There is, I think, humour here which does not translate well from English into sanity.' 'That's pretty rich coming from the agnostic Knight of the Cross with a holy Sword who takes his orders from an archangel.' I said. - Harry Dresden & Sanya, Changes, Jim Butcher

A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man