In a sense the whole American comic tradition had been that of social criticism.

- Constance Rourke

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

- Constance Rourke

There is scarcely an aspect of the American character to which humor is not related, few which in some sense it has not governed. ... It is a lawless…

- Constance Rourke

humor bears the closest relation to emotion, either bubbling up as from a deep and happy wellspring, or in an opposite fashion rising like a re-birth…

- Constance Rourke

Humor has been a fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way through the national life, holding tenaciously to the spread elements of that lif…

- Constance Rourke

Whole phases of comedy have become empty; the comic rejoinder has become every man's tool.

- Constance Rourke

In comedy, reconcilement with life comes at the point when to the tragic sense only an inalienable difference or dissension with life appears.

- Constance Rourke