humorists

Humour is the only test of gravity and gravity of humour for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.

Novelist Peter de Vries like Adlai Stevenson and Mark Twain has suffered from the American assumption that anyone with a sense of humour is not to be taken seriously.

The best definition of humour I know is: humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof. I think this is the best I know because I wrote it myself.

Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.

Any man will admit if need be that his sight is not good or that he cannot swim or shoots badly with a rifle but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him mortal affront.

Comedy is tragedy - plus time.

Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration.

Humour is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention. But it has no persuasive value at all.

A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people.

A humorist is a man who feels bad but who feels good about it.

Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Humour is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot.

A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it never in the tongue Of him that makes it.

The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

Humour is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.