He leaned his head against the rock. Christ, when was the last time he’d seen the humor in life? And now, of all places, in an enemy camp, with a strange woman who made him burn. Burn with desire. Burn with need. A desire and need not only for her and her body, but for something he couldn’t quite name.
People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.
While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top,spreading his laugh across the water. Laughing at the girl,at the guys, at George,at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He know's there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain.
Many moral advances have taken the form of a shift in sensibilities that made an action seem more ridiculous than sinful, such as dueling, bullfighting, and jingoistic war. And many effective social critics, such as Swift, Johnson, Voltaire, Twain, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Tom Lehrer, and George Carlin have been smart-ass comedians rather than thundering prophets. What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?Humor works by confronting an audience with an incongruity, which may be resolved by switching to another frame of reference. And in that alternative frame of reference, the butt of the joke occupies a lowly or undignified status. ...Humor with a political or moral agenda can stealthily challenge a relational model that is second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that it leads to consequences that the rest of their minds recognize as absur
I think it’s vital. It’s odd to me because many people say we live in these awful times and we need culture and art especially in times like these, in these dire times. Well, first of all, I don’t think these times are more dire than other times. People who say that just need to go back and read Herodotus, read any book of history, read a biography of Attila the Hun. If people are going to wring their hands over these troubled times, I would think that humor should be indispensable. I find it strange that –at least in my take on it—the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient.
“People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.”
“Now there are several sites on the Internet where you can see commercials from all over the world. In other words, the universe has multiplied, and we've had two people doing nothing but looking at various spots. Then we've gone through three different phases of deciding what we think the public will find humorous or witty or irreverent.”
“One of the things that I always sort of pride myself on - although we're not supposed to have pride... is that my sense of humor, if anything, was well-rounded, and you know how I discovered that? It's because everything funny that ever happened to me, or everything that happened to me, made me laugh. If I fell down the stairs I'd lay there and laugh.”
“We understand the Wal-Mart customer and know that bringing them Garth Brooks exclusives in the upcoming years is something that'll excite them as much as it excites us, ... We've all missed him -- his natural humor and his ability to touch each of our lives through his music and lyrics that seem to reach into our very souls.”
“His personality leans to some 'off-color' type of jokes and some people find him funny and amusing to be around and some people take offense. I doubt he will change who he is and nor should he. ... He has kids and now he has to explain why his sense of humor has cost him.”