LAUGHTER QUOTES III
quotations about laughter
A laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
MARK TWAIN
The Mysterious Stranger
Casting for a comedy is not that difficult because laughing is an involuntary thing. They make you laugh? That's the person you should cast.
DAVID CASPE
"The Oral History of 'Happy Endings'", Complex, April 5, 2016
If ever the day should come when men and women shall be content to signal their perception of humour by the natural smile, and shall keep the laugh for its own unpremeditated act, shall laugh seldom, and simply, and not thrice at the same thing--once for foolish surprise, and twice for tardy intelligence, and thrice to let it be known that they are amused--then it may be time to persuade this laughing nation not to laugh so loud as it is wont in public. The theatre audiences of louder-speaking nations laugh lower than ours. The laugh that is chiefly a signal of the laugher's sense of the ridiculous is necessarily loud; and it has the disadvantage of covering what we may perhaps wish to hear from the actors. It is a public laugh, and no ordinary citizen is called upon for a public laugh. He may laugh in public, but let it be with private laughter there.
ALICE MEYNELL
"Laughter", Ceres' Runaway & Other Essays
It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
Laugh, and be fat, sir, your penance is known.
They that love mirth, let them heartily drink,
'Tis the only receipt to make sorrow sink.
BEN JONSON
"The Penates", Masques and Entertainments
Nothing is more silly than silly laughter.
CATULLUS
Carmina
Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.
JAMES THURBER
13 Clocks
The problem is that we live in an uptight country. Why don't we just laugh at ourselves? We are funny. Gays are funny. Straights are funny. Women are funny. Men are funny. We are all funny, and we all do funny things. Let's laugh about it.
BOB NEWHART
I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This
Twenty years ago, ten years ago, I should have laughed, and have professed to you that I had merely smiled. A very young man is not content to be very young, nor even a young man to be young: he wants to share the dignity of his elders. There is no dignity in laughter, there is much of it in smiles. Laughter is but a joyous surrender, smiles give token of mature criticism. It may be that in the early ages of this world there was far more laughter than is to be heard now, and that aeons hence laughter will be obsolete, and smiles universal--every one, always, mildly, slightly, smiling. But it is less useful to speculate as to mankind's past and future than to observe men. And you will have observed with me in the club-room that young men at most times look solemn, whereas old men or men of middle age mostly smile; and also that those young men do often laugh loud and long among themselves, while we others--the gayest and best of us in the most favourable circumstances--seldom achieve more than our habitual act of smiling. Does the sound of that laughter jar on us? Do we liken it to the crackling of thorns under a pot? Let us do so. There is no cheerier sound. But let us not assume it to be the laughter of fools because we sit quiet. It is absurd to disapprove of what one envies, or to wish a good thing were no more because it has passed out of our possession.
MAX BEERBOHM
"Laughter", And Even Now
You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.
BILL COSBY
attributed, Humor Me
In regard to health care, we've all heard that laughter is the best medicine. Laughter is also our least costly healthcare option.
DANNY MURPHY
"If elected president, I promise a laugh in every belly!", The Florida Times-Union, April 1, 2016
Laugh now, cry later.
ERMA BOMBECK
The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank
Laughing cheerfulness throws the light of day on all the paths of life.
JEAN PAUL RICHTER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion.... I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.
KURT VONNEGUT
Palm Sunday
Laughter has been claimed to do pretty much everything, from reducing stress to helping cure cancer. Most major children's hospitals have clown doctors cheering up kids. There is a special brand of yoga -- Hasyayoga -- that incorporates laughter. We have laughter clubs that espouse the health benefits of laughing as an exercise -- no jokes, just spontaneous mirth.
STEVE ELLEN
"The lowdown on laughter: from boosting immunity to releasing tension", The Conversation, March 22, 2016
Laughter is free, free your laughter.
ANONYMOUS
Laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter. Strange, too, that not to one of all the characters in romance has such an end been allotted. Has it ever struck you what a chance Shakespeare missed when he was finishing the Second Part of King Henry the Fourth? Falstaff was not the man to stand cowed and bowed while the new young king lectured him and cast him off. Little by little, as Hal proceeded in that portentous allocution, the humour of the situation would have mastered old Sir John. His face, blank with surprise at first, would presently have glowed and widened, and his whole bulk have begun to quiver. Lest he should miss one word, he would have mastered himself. But the final words would have been the signal for release of all the roars pent up in him; the welkin would have rung; the roars, belike, would have gradually subsided in dreadful rumblings of more than utterable or conquerable mirth. Thus and thus only might his life have been rounded off with dramatic fitness, secundum ipsius naturam. He never should have been left to babble of green fields and die 'an it had been any christom child.'
MAX BEERBOHM
"Laughter", And Even Now
The immoderate cannot laugh moderately.
JOHANN KASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man