Puns are little plays on words that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.

Quite the contrary, it was an act of disdain for the complicated interchange known as conversation: for its vagaries, lost and meandering trails, half-understandings, and mysterious clarities. For the meaning of a pun is clear, all too clear. It demands a leap in understanding, to the exact place the punner demands.

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.

Puns are the highest form of literature.

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence.

Puns are incompatible with murder.

To laugh at cheap jests is as base as to pray to cheap gods.

Comedy, as we said, is an imitation of people of a lower sort, though not in respect to every vice; rather, what is ridiculous is part of what is ugly.

There is little success where there is little laughter.

the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful.

Even one person's misunderstanding [of a blue joke] may not be worth the next guy's laugh.

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

Laughter, when out of place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of feeling, may be the most terrible modulation of the human voice.

When a society cannot ridicule and criticize its institutions, it cannot laugh. The shortest book ever written would be the history of German humor, a culture that has suffered spells of paralyzing fear of authority. Comedy is at heart an angry, antisocial art. To solve the problem of weak comedy, therefore, the writer first asks: What am I angry about? He finds that aspect of society that heats his blood and goes on an assault.