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Laughter

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“I like people. They're entertaining. I just may laugh at different things than most people. I laugh at mistakes. I laugh at how you recover from mistakes.”
Jim Carrey (born 1962) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in An Interview with Jim Carrey: We talk to the comedy mastermind about his most reserved performance by Jeff Otto IGN (12 March 2004)
“Nell: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.Nagg: Oh?Nell: Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe not you, buddy, but the rest are even scared to open up and laugh. You know, that's the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn't anybody laughing. I haven't heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”
Ken Kesey (1935–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our stepfather, who art in the convent; cursed be thy name; thy greed depart, thy windpipe be slit on earth as it is in heaven. Return to us this day our daily bread; and make us laugh with thy horse laugh, as you laugh when you fleece us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from thy evil tongue. Amen.”
Marcelo H. del Pilar (1850–1896) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Del Pilar's parody of The Lord's Prayer, Dasalan at Tocsohan (1888)
“Yet, even today we still laugh sad laughs, remembering our innocent incredulity. Our inability to imagine certain forms of evil, the scope and depth of some strains of ruthlessness. We laugh, to hide the gaping hole where our hearts used to be. Guguletu killed us . . . killed the thing that held us together . . . made us human. Yet, we still laugh.”
Sindiwe Magona (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Twas the saying of [Georgias Leontinus apud Arist. Rhetor. lib. 3. cap. 18… which the Translator renders, Seria Risu, Risum Seriis discutere] an ancient sage that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit.”
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) first seen 1709 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), Part 1, Sec. 5
“Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, "Humour studies would that be, sir?”
Keith Waterhouse (1929–2009) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Spectator, January 15, 1994
“The best-humour'd man, with the worst-humour'd Muse.”
Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) said by 1774 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Scotch are too cautious to be witty — they take thought beforehand of their answers ; they are not people of impulse, and wit is an impulse. "It springs spontaneous if it spring." But then they have humour, rich, racy, sly humour, full of national character, and nearly allied to pathos.”
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) said by 1838 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You will get these people who are felt to be educational, even though, as Clive James said, a sense of humour is common sense dancing. Those who haven’t got it, a sense of humour, shouldn’t be trusted with anything. You’re amazed they can get across the road. But proclaimed humourlessness has a constituency, I don’t know why.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lateral thinking is closely related to insight, creativity and humour. All four processes have the same basis. But whereas insight, creativity and humour can only be prayed for, lateral thinking is a more deliberate process. It is as definite a way of using the mind as logical thinking — but a very different way.”
Edward de Bono (1933–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some critics think the way I write is somehow disrespectful to food. But how can you write a restaurant column without being entertaining? You might as well not get up in the morning. People complain my sense of humour is puerile but the reason I have a job is because my sense of humour is puerile.”
Giles Coren (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think any time a writer wants to take on a difficult topic without sounding didactic, humour really helps. Sexism is demeaning, depressing, infuriating, boring, inefficient, stupid, revolting and completely unscientific – in other words, not funny. But people reveal both their strengths and weaknesses when they try to deal with it, or not deal with it, and therein lies the potential for humour.”
Bonnie Garmus (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There has to be humour to open up the person to the subject of change, the possibility of change. You have to be open. Humour opens people up.”
Lee Maracle (1950–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humour is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery is suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination is certainly false wit.”
Aristotle (misattributed) first seen 1709 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), Part 1, Sec. 5, incorrectly attributing it to Gorgias via Aristotle.
“Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?”
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) said by 1616 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“I have transcended that phase in my intellectual growth where I discover humour in simple freakishness. What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since wherever lives must die. Only fantasy, the vapours rising from sheer nonsense, can now excite my laughter.”
Jack Vance (1916–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man.”
Margaret Mead (1901–1978) said by 1978 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he sense of humour has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Always warm up the audience with a joke....If you are not a particularly funny person, make sure that you inform them that it's a joke....”
Jacob M. Appel (born 1973) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sphinx Society lecture, Brown University, April 3, 2003 (as reported in the Brown Daily Herald)
“It is — or seems to be — a wise sort of thing, to realise that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of joke, especially his misfortunes, if he have them. And it is also worth bearing in mind, that the joke is passed round pretty liberally & impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it.”
Herman Melville (1819–1891) first seen 1851 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Samuel Savage (24 August 1851); in Lynn Horth, ed., The Writings of Herman Melville: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, vol. 14 (1993), p. 203
“Don't make a film if it can't be the film you want to make. It's a joke, and a sick joke, and it'll kill you.”
David Lynch (1946–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Look, I was surprised when they offered me the job and I knew they weren't fooling, but this is not a joke. It will have to be fun for me to want to keep it, but I am not a joke.”
Yogi Berra (1925–2015) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Regarding his upcoming debut as Yankees manager; quoted in "If Yanks Lose, I'll Be Blamed" by Milton Gross, The Boston Globe (February 17, 1964), p. 15.
“Hey, this is a joke that I wrote a long time ago. I actually, I really really, wrote this joke. [Following in reverse] So I'm walking down the street, right? And I saw this prostitute, right? And I said, 'How much?' She said, 'For $300, I'll do anything you want.' I said, 'Bitch, paint my house!'”
Chris Rock (born 1965) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only the saints would joke so about the gods, because it was either joke or scream, and they alone knew it was all the same to the gods.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A guy told me he liked cherries... But... I waited to see if he was gonna say tomato... Before I realized he likes cherries just... All right, that joke is ridiculous. That's like a carbon copy of the previous joke but with different ingredients. I don't know what I was trying to pull off there.”
Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The specific element that occurs in every single successful joke is surprise. Surprise. A line of logic is going one way, and then, it doesn't. I call it "making non-sense". You go "That doesn't make any sense, but I get it." That-- That's the words that people use to describe a joke: "I got it.”
Jerry Seinfeld (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On [Seinfeld], we were extremely meticulous in our scripting of every scene, every joke, every line. [...] When people came on that show, they were told by script supervisors "You don't change one comma", because that's-- the precision of joke-making generally requires that.”
Jerry Seinfeld (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I speculate that the genesis of the chicken-joke lies in some situation such as the one illustrated above, but over time the original context of the joke was lost, which left the chicken sadly decontextualized.”
Ryan North (born 1980) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was once said, as a commercial joke, that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. The same is true in this case, but not as a joke: It’s not nice to fool with history.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) first seen 1619 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1619 and the Narrative of Despair" (11 May 2020), National Review
“It does seem to me that the job of comedy is to offend, or have the potential to offend, and it cannot be drained of that potential. Every joke has a victim. That’s the definition of a joke. Someone or something or an idea is made to look ridiculous....In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
Rowan Atkinson (born 1955) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in an interview with The Irish Times (2022)
“The joke is not on Modi. The joke is on the "educated" elite/middle class supporters of Modi who have made idiocy and ignorance fashionable.”
Nissim Mannathukkaren first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Narendra Modi's claim that he was likely the first person to sent digital colour pictures as an email attachment in in India in the late 1980s. Twitter post, 13 May 2019. Quoted in Why the joke is not on Modi but on …
“The instant death— it's like a punchline to this joke, where the joke is really just the tension of being in this dangerous situation. [...] The fact that when [a run] ends, it's instantaneous, I think is very humorous. And it's this nice release, in some sense. It's frustrating, but it's also a release— and it creates this pregnant pause afterwards, where you can really think about what happened.”
Derek Yu (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I found the reaction shocking. And then I suppose I came to the conclusion - gradually - that I must have got it wrong. [...] I thought for a long time that in the context of The Spectator it was fine and that people who read The Spectator would know it was a joke and that there was a point behind the joke as well.”
Rod Liddle (1960–2026) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Referring to the reaction to his 2009 column about Harriet Harman (see above), cited from an interview by Viv Groskop "Rod Liddle: Maybe I was wrong to say I wouldn't sleep with Harriet Harman", Evening Standard (2 Octo…
“My parents and I always joke about how far we’ve come, especially when we play in these big tournaments and the facilities are amazing. Before we would joke about all these places back home — and now we’re in Paris... it’s definitely a different level.”
Alexandra Eala (born 2005) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I had not become a painter, I would surely have become a clown.. .. because I make people laugh.. ..Faces deformed by suffering, humour or work. Often crazy. They then became imaginary, when I adorned them with movements free colours depending on the head. The colour too become clown-like”
Karel Appel (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He made one laugh sometimes by speaking the truth, but this is a form of humour which gains its force only by its unusualness; it would cease to amuse if it were commonly practised.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He's always been the person who's made me laugh most. He uses humour in a very disarming way. I've seen how people enjoy his company and have always envied that, and have wanted to aspire to that.”
Jack Whitehall (born 1988) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hattenstone, Simon (14 December 2013), "Comedians and their parents: Jack Whitehall and father Michael", The Guardian. Retrieved September 25, 2017.
“I laugh again not in humour at the seeming punishment of the staffs who participated in the padding of our 2016 budget.”
Florence Ozor (born 1980) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it is a good thing to laugh a lot, isn’t it?, I mean I’m a jolly good person, I find humour in things and I have no reservations laughing so there you have it. As I go older I would rather have wrinkles from laughing than from frowning.”
Omotu Bissong (born 1985) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because I grew up in a township there was a whole lot of people calling me white and asking me to speak English, I had to have a good sense of humour about it. You either cry or you laugh”
Jo-Anne Reyneke (born 1988) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Comedy comes from a very deep background: I went down deep, collected my shells and when I came up, I made sure that everything I had brought back did a somersault. Humour does not come only from ridicule; on the contrary, we laugh not at someone but thanks to someone: this is its greatness.”
Anna Marchesini (1953–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you recall the laughter of the Philistines at the helpless Sampson? You can hear the echo of that laughter to-day, as the church, shorn of her strength by her own sin, is an object of ridicule to the world, who cry in derision, "Where is your boasted triumph and your Millennial glory?”
Abbott Eliot Kittredge (1834–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only laughter can blow [a colossal humbug] to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.”
Bill Hicks (1961–1994) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement written weeks before his death in 1994, as quoted in "Unseen Bill Hicks Clip" in Esquire (3 February 2014)
“I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown. (Laughter, Applause), my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved (Laughter), the Iron Lady of the Western world.”
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to Finchley Conservatives (31 January 1976)
“I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.”
John Updike (1932–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, the UK is home to a very diverse newspaper community, a vibrant newspaper culture. We've got papers like The Sun, The Mirror, The Mail. [laughter]...we're trusted slightly more than the BBC. Now, that's a little scary -- [laughter]”
Jimmy Wales (born 1966) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: This is my annual traditional talk(Jimmy Wales Speaks at Closing Ceremony of Wikimania 2014) +video
“You have practically taken over the whole of the engineering works of this country and controlled them by the State. I have seen resolutions passed from time to time at Trade Union Congresses [laughter] about nationalising the industries of this country. We have done it. [Cheers and laughter.]”
David Lloyd George (1863–1945) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Trades Union Congress in Bristol (9 September 1915), quoted in War Memoirs: Volume I (1938), p. 186