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.
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 comedian is a fellow who finds other comedians too humorous to mention.
If it's sanity you're after There's no recipe like Laughter. Laugh it off.
Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
Comedy is tragedy - plus time.
Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
The ability to laugh at life is right at the top, with love and communication, in the hierarchy of our needs. Humour has much to do with pain; it exaggerates the anxieties and absurdities we feel, so that we gain distance and through laughter, relief.
He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh.
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
You encourage a comic man too much, and he gets silly.
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.
Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.
Wit is far more often a shield than a lance.
If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist - I feel like countering with the word seriousist.
A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it.
Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.
Humour is just another defence against the universe.
The great humorist forgets himself in his delighted contemplation of other people.
