Humor Significance Quotes

A joke is a very serious thing.

In Buddhism, they say attachment to anything only leads to suffering. So when we laugh, it's our way of saying, 'I'm unattached to that.' You're tickled by it, it makes your lobes do something on their own. So humor is very important to me. I always take that to the stage first.

Well, I think that there's a value to comedy in and of itself.

Without the laughs, the audience wouldn't be there at all, so in that sense, yes, I am a comedian.

Comedy - and I say this with humility - comedy needs me.

Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth.

Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.

Every American, to the last man, lays claim to a "sense" of humor and guards it as his most significant spiritual trait, yet rejects humor as a contaminating element wherever found. America is a nation of comics and comedians; nevertheless, humor has no stature and is accepted only after the death of the perpetrator.

We do not take humor seriously enough.

This is going to sound pretentious, but I like comedy that addresses something I find either worrisome or interesting in my life.

A sense of humor isn't everything. It's only 90 percent of everything.

The sense of humor has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.

If this humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain.

'M*A*S*H,' to me, was about something. It had value beyond the laughs.

Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure.

Jokes for jokes' sake are kind of meaningless to me. I understand the value of them, but it doesn't speak to me as much. You can lace your argument with jokes, but tell me why you're presenting this argument. What does it mean?