Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.
He that jokes confesses.
There are things of deadly earnest that can only be safely mentioned under cover of a joke.
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.
Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.
A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people.
Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.
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.
A humorist is a man who feels bad but who feels good about it.
Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.
Wit is the only wall Between us and the dark.
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration.
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.
Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process.
Humour is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.
The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.
