A good joke is the closest thing we have to divine revelation.
Interpretation
A good joke can provide profound insights, similar to spiritual revelations.
Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that humor, particularly a well-crafted joke, can reveal deep truths about life, humanity, and the world, much like divine revelations do. He highlights the power of laughter and cleverness in understanding and experiencing our existence, implying that humor can lead us to a greater understanding of ourselves and our surroundings.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of laughter in our lives.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
You feel completely in control when you hear a wave of laughter coming back at you that you have caused.
You can't map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.
They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now.
If I were you, I'd sue my face for slander.
He was a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
Sex and death. Two things that come but once in my lifetime, but at least after death you're not nauseous.
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