Academic Humor Quotes

My rule in making up examination questions is to ask questions which I can't myself answer. It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me.

What do you think I'm a professor of? The little finger? (On offers of honorary doctorates.)

Then you have people coming up like Malcolm Bradbury, a relatively young writer who deals with the academic scene and deals with it, I think, brilliantly.

I am a Doctor. A.B... M.A... PH.D... ABMAPHID! Abmaphid has been variously described as a wasting disease of the frontal lobes, and as a wonder drug. It is actually both.

It's kind of ironic that if I get my Ph.D., I'll be a real doctor.

In school, I was a genius of the year preceding the year I was in, every year.

I was the one of those students who made the top half of the class possible.

I am no Rushdie. The only people who think of silencing me are my students, on days when my lectures are more opaque than usual.

Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.

The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne.

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?"

In fact, it used to be a joke if you studied at a University.

A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word "hermeneutics" in the dictionary.

And if something should be found, particularly in the first part of the dissertation, that one is generally not accustomed to come across in scholarly writings, the reader must forgive my jocundity, just as I, in order to lighten the burden, sometimes sing at my work.

I tell people, 'I have a Ph.D. from Google University.'

Point set topology is a disease from which the human race will soon recover.

Well, I've obviously been a great source of inspiration to the academic population of Salford! They're citing me as a major contribution to their upward trajectory!

I'll probably take the prize for the most irrelevant degree. Although some of the things now where they study, you know: "post feministic colonial film theory" - those kind of majors, yeah, that's probably worse. But I was, you know, classics, Greek and Latin, like what's more irrelevant than dead languages, you know?

The book Dynamic Programming by Richard Bellman is an important, pioneering work in which a group of problems is collected together at the end of some chapters under the heading "Exercises and Research Problems," with extremely trivial questions appearing in the midst of deep, unsolved problems. It is rumored that someone once asked Dr. Bellman how to tell the exercises apart from the research problems, and he replied: "If you can solve it, it is an exercise; otherwise it's a research problem."

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

I didn't know there was a dying-professor section at the bookstore.

This impeccably researched study of the classic black insult game may be the funniest work of serious scholarship ever published.

I still feel threatened by academics, but my books have a lot of academic in-jokes and everybody assumes I went to university and studied English.