24 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes on Humor

Kurt Vonnegut quotes on humor

8. The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

19. I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime.

35. Son - they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose.

60. I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.

63. Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for each reaction there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction. This can be useful in rocketry.

72. No grown woman is a fan of premature ejaculation.

115. Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Why don't you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooon!

118. Sally In The Garden: Sally in the garden, Siftin' through the cinders, Lifted up her arse, And farted like a man, The busting of her britches broke fifteen windows, The cheeks of her ass went (bam, bam, bam)

128. Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward - and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.

145. If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

166. I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, 'Isaac is up in Heaven now.' That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored. I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience - the accidental one. So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, 'He's up in Heaven now.' Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this. My epitaph in any case? 'Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.' I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.

167. I wish one and all long and happy lives, no matter what may become of them afterwards. Use sunscreen! Don't smoke cigarettes. Cigars, however, are good for you : Firearms are also good for you : Gunpowder has zero fat and zero cholesterol. That goes for dumdums, too.

168. Freud said he didn't know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.

170. Ta ta and adios. Or, as Saint Peter said to me with a sly wink, when I told him I was on my last-round trip to Paradise: 'See you later, Alligator.'

175. During my most recently controlled near-death experience, I got to interview William Shakespeare. We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, 'fit to split the ears of groundlings.' He asked if it had a name, and I said 'Indianapolis.'

199. If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.

201. Old Norwegian Proverb: Swedes have short dicks but long memories.

205. Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.

213. While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one slider said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, 'I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.' Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it.

216. If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke.

217. A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.

218. Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be.

235. Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand

237. You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.