A joke is a very serious thing.

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

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

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

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

The Irish do have a despairing quality of gaiety, but they have also a dour and brooding ghost that rides on their shoulders and peers in on their thoughts. Let them laugh too loudly, it sticks a long finger down their throats. They condemn themselves before they are charged, and this makes them defensive always.

Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.

I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.

You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Every culture has a butt for its jokes. Americans have the Polacks, the English have the Irish, and the Irish have people from Cork.

"Ah, I feel a sadness on me, Dane. That's how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can't say, "I <b>am</b> sad," or "I <b>am</b> happy". They understood what we English have long forgot. We're <b>not</b> our sadness. We're not our happiness or our pain but our language hypnotizes us and traps us in little labelled boxes."

Anyone who is considered funny will tell you, sometimes without even your asking, that deep inside they are very serious, neurotic, introspective people.