funny quotes

The rewards for being sane may not be very many but knowing what's funny is one of them.

- Sir Kingsley Amis
  Stanley and the Women, ch.2.

   Mourir, ce n'est rien. Commence donc par vivre. C'est moins dro"  le et c'est plus long. To die is nothing. Begin by living. It's less funnyand lasts longer.

-Jean Anouilh
  Rome  o et  Jeannette, act 3.

Funny youshould ask. Asa matterof fact Idid havea light temperature when I set out.

- Lord (Edward Christian) David Gascoyne Cecil
Response to a Berlin nightclubber's ambiguous question,'Sind Sie normal?'. Quoted in  Jonathan Keates'The Delightful Lord David', in the Times Literary Supplement,1 Mar1991. Keates also describes how Cecil had confessed that, had he visited Sodom and Gomorrah, he would probably only have noticed the cathedral.

Life was a funny thing that happened tome ontheway to the grave.

- Quentin Crisp
  The Naked Civil Servant, ch.18.

Funny without being vulgar.

- Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
  Of Sir Henry Beerbohm Tree's performance as Hamlet. Attributed.

What do you mean, funny? Funny peculiar, or funny ha- ha?

- Ian pseudonym of  Major-General John Hay Beith Hay
  The Housemaster, act 3.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

- Ernest Millar Hemingway
  Letter, 6 Dec.

I felt quite funny when Freud died. It was like having a continent disappear.

- Randall Jarrell
  Letter to  Allen Tate, Sep.

Whatever isfunny issubversive, every joke isultimatelya custard pie† A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack uponmorality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

- George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
  'The  Art of Donald McGill'.

Everything is funny as long as it is happening to Somebody Else.

-Will Rogers
  The Illiterate Digest,'Warning toJokers: Lay Off the Prince'.

Be funny on a golf course? Do I kid my best friend's mother about her heart condition?

- Phil originally Philip Silver Silvers
Quoted in Michael HobbsThe Golf Quotation Book (1992).

If I laugh on that particular day I become so filled with Laughing Gas that I simply can't keep on the ground. Even if I smile it happens.The first funny thought, and I'm up like a balloon. And until I can thinkof something serious I can't get down again.

- P(amela) L(yndon) Travers
  MrWigg, Mary Poppins's uncle.The'particular day' is when his birthday falls on a Friday. Mary Poppins, ch.3.

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.

-TennesseeThomas Lanier Williams
  In the Observer,7 Apr.