Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

Humor is a silent and polite dynamite which enables you to blow your own way of life sky-high every time you have had enough of it, yet with the maximum discretion and without making a mess.

A joke is a very serious thing.

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

Humor is a tool to ease the harsh realities of life.

A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.

There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them.

Humor is reason gone mad.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. It is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, but that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

Humor is an excellent method of keeping a tight rein on unproductive displays of emotion.