Quotes on Jokes

The bad thing about being a famous comedian is that every now and then someone approaches me to tell an old joke. Don't tell me jokes - I have that. People also say the weirdest things, sometimes sarcastic things, and even evil things. They like to provoke to get a reaction.

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped.

I don't do jokes. The characters are my jokes.

I learned how fast you can go from being an international hero to being a reference in a joke on a late night talk show.

Now, some people do this for shock value. Shock is just another uptown word for surprise. Granted it has a different quality to it, but a joke is about surprising someone. I'm a great believer in context. You can joke about anything. I do like finding out where the line is drawn, deliberately crossing it and bringing some of them with me across the line, and having them be happy that I did.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

It was too much. The comfortable people made comfortable jokes about weather and things but I sat mostly silent saying a word or so when necessary a word or so trying to hide from them the fact that I was a fool and feeling terrible And I was numb, numb again, numb again again and again, numbness and pain swelling in me.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

We've got people looking at our seamy side and our sad side a lot of the time because that's easier. It's much more difficult to make a film about happiness with lots of jokes in it.

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.

These two are the parts. The inner silence - the silence so deep that there is no vibration in your being. You are, but there are no waves. You are just a pool without waves, not a single wave arises. The whole being silent, still. Inside, at the center, silence, and on the periphery, celebration and laughter. And only silence can laugh, because only silence can understand the cosmic joke.

If I can enjoy a joke at the expense of another; if I can in any way slight another in conversation, or even in thought, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

This is where men, even the trustiest, fail us. Their heart is never so wholly given to any matter but that some trifle of a meal, or a drink, or a sleep, or a joke, or a girl, may come in between them and it, and then (even if you are a queen) you'll get no more good out of them until they've had their way.

I don't know how to tell a joke. I never tell jokes. I can tell stories that happened to me... anecdotes. But never a joke.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.

She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music. She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school.

There has been nothing more impactful on my life and meaningful to me than the introduction of Christ. That, hands down, blows away every joke I've ever written.

We are surrounded by hundreds of 'tribes,' each speaking their own distinct slanguage of colourful words, jokes and phrases that together form an idiosyncratic phrasebook, years in the making.