26 James Thurber Quotes on Humor

James Thurber quotes on humor

2. Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?

8. Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

17. Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddam. (sic)

24. Boys are perhaps beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of eighteen months and ninety years.

28. The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

33. In order to be eligible to play it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter.

34. I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.

35. Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light ... We all know that, as the old adage has it, 'It is later than you think.' ..., but I also say occasionally: 'It is lighter than you think.' In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

36. The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.

38. I am not a dog lover. A dog lover to me means a dog that is in love with another dog.

43. Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed - but never the husband).

45. Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

51. The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

53. If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.

54. Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

57. One (martini) is all right, two is too many, three is not enough.

62. A fish is like a dish that floats in the sea but is no greater than me.

64. 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.

71. It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.

72. Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!

73. Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.

76. Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.

83. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

85. The most dangerous food is wedding cake.

93. Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

95. Never allow a nervous female to have access to a pistol, no matter what you're wearing.