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

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

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

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

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

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Love is meant to be taken seriously, like a joke.

The increasing seriousness of things, then that's the great opportunity of jokes.

That’s the Irish People all over - they treat a serious thing as a joke and a joke as a serious thing.

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

Any serious philosophy can be described entirely through jokes.

Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serious motive for deceiving another.

Two men, dressed as city employees, block off a busy street and start digging it up. The traffic cop, motorists and pedestrians assume that this familiar scene has a practical explanation – a water main or an electric cable is being repaired – and make no attempt to use the street. In fact, however, the two diggers are private citizens in disguise who have no business there.

All practical jokes are anti-social acts, but this does not necessarily mean that all practical jokes are immoral. A moral practical joke exposes some flaw of society which is hindrance to a real community or brotherhood. That it should be possible for two private individuals to dig up a street without being stopped is a just criticism of the impersonal life of a large city where most people are strangers to each other, not brothers; in a village where all inhabitants know each other personally, the deception would be impossible.

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.