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Humour and Humorists Quotes and Quotations
 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. 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. The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds. Laughter is the sensation of feeling good all over, and showing it principally in one spot. He who laughs, lasts. We are all here for a spell, get all the good laughs you can. No one is more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much. A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling. One loses so many laughs by not laughing at oneself. You can pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty. Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it. The love of truth lies at the root of much humour. 
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