Funny Quotes

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Keyword: Funny

Quotes: 635 total. 1 Misattributed. 75 About.

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"'Isaiah' – what a funny name for a teddy bear!" "Well, you see one eye's 'igher than the other."
"If you were half as funny as you thought you were, my boy, you'd be twice as funny as you are."
Those who delight in bad movies and enjoy producing their own unfilmed versions of Mystery Science Theater 3000 may gain a measure of semi-masochistic enjoyment out of Van Helsing. There are quite a few unintentionally funny moments, although the overall experience was too intensely painful for me to be able to advocate it as being "so bad, it's good."
Yeah, just recently Ted Lilly was pitching in the first inning against the Pittsburgh Pirates, and he slipped twice on two bunt plays. Anyways, Lou [Piniella] came out to check on him and asked him if he had his metal spikes on and he did. Lou then said well do you have any other cleats in the locker room and Ted said, "Skip, your zippers down." Lou was really embarrassed about that. He turns to do something about it, but then realized that he was on national TV and realized he couldn't do anything. That was a very awkward, but funny story.
No one laughs at God when the cops knock on their door
And they say "We've got some bad news, sir."

No one's laughing at God when there's a famine, fire or flood

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke
Or when the crazies say He hates us
And they get so red in the head you think they're 'bout to choke

God can be funny
When told he'll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious...

"It's fair funny. I've gone from having no home, to having too many!"
The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn’t made every line funny. It’s so depressing."
"I love things made out of animals," Sedaris says, holding a knife with a hoof for a handle. "It's just so funny to think of someone saying, 'I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.'"
Halfway down the stairs Is a stair Where I sit. There isn't any Other stair Quite like It. I'm not at the bottom, I'm not at the top; So this is the stair Where I always Stop. Halfway up the stairs Isn't up, Isn't down. It isn't in the nursery, It isn't in the town. And all sorts of funny thoughts Run round my head: "It isn't really Anywhere! It's somewhere else Instead!"
So when all the yielding and objections is over, the other Senator said, "I object to the remarks of a professional joker being put into the Congressional Record." Taking a dig at me, see? They didn't want any outside fellow contributing. Well, he had me wrong. Compared to them I'm an amateur, and the thing about my jokes is that they don't hurt anybody. You can say they're not funny or they're terrible or they're good or whatever it is, but they don't do no harm. But with Congress — every time they make a joke it's a law. And every time they make a law it's a joke.
"Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny."
From there to here,
from here to there,
funny things are everywhere.
I've always run by the hierarchy of "If not funny, interesting. If not interesting, hot. If not hot, bizarre. If not bizarre, break something."
"It's a funny thing this celebrity. If you don't wave back you're a miserable bugger, if you do wave back you're a big-headed bugger. I don't know."
"I like reading Ball Tongue lyrics and all that stuff. And they published a book, and I wouldn't give my lyrics, and it's all wrong in the book, and I giggle. It's funny."
“How does one conquer fear, Don B.?” “One takes a frog and sews it to one’s shoe,” he said. “The left or the right?” Don B. gave me a pitying look. “Well, you’d look mighty funny going down the street with only one frog sewed to your shoes, wouldn’t you?" he said. “One frog on each shoe.”
Well, I thought it was funny.
Everything is funny as long as it is happening to Somebody Else.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
God, you make me sing. Funny things about you You infect my mind. All the time, you do. ~ "She Fell Into My Arms".
They said I wasn't being funny. And I said to them, "I know that, but tomorrow I will go back to being funny, and your show will still blow."
"Dreams are funny like that. You want something so desperately, you somehow get it, then just as suddenly it's over. Like running races--all that training for a couple of minutes on the track. The secret, I've learned, is to appreciate the process."
But it was amazing to see this man crying, and grateful to God for this, and to love this animal as if it was his child. Well, events took a turn for the bittersweet when he let me know last night that he's moving, out of town, even, and he's taking Has Wounds with him (and yes, he called her that.) And he wanted to thank me again. And my only reply was "what else could I have done, but more?" So — I should not ever see her again, I think — but had I not gotten the Grace to happen to come across this man, thanks to God, at my door, I would have assumed that she had died. So I'm very grateful that I got to see him, and we got to pray together and embrace each other, and know what really was going on, all this time we were afraid. Well, she was right next door for either one of us. And it was very funny too, that this man's name was Francisco, because it's very much a St. Francis story, with an animal, you know?
Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.
Ohh, I guess you got me there. He's absolutely right. I'm just a wash up. Gotta stand on the stage. - responding to the heckler saying "You're not funny! You're a reject! You never had no shows! You never had no movies! 'Seinfeld' that's it!"
[On death & euthanasia] I think its funny how, that if I want to die with peace and dignity that there's someone far away that can prevent it. Someone's like [strong southern accent] 'Hi, I just wanted to call. This is Jeanette Dunwoody from Valdosta, Georgia. I heard that you're trying to kill yourself and I just wanna say that, well, you can't.' 'What?' 'Yeah, its not right, because all life is precious.' 'No, my life isn't precious, I've been reduced to a shit and piss factory. I hurt always. I'm going to die within a year and I'm in pain constantly.' 'Oh, but um...no. Because of the Bible.' 'Well, I don't believe in the Bible.' 'Well, I do, silly!' [Hangs up]
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
(To Midnight) "Is it that funny to you when someone's sad? In that case, I'll beat you 'till you won't even be able to crack a smile!"
As I walk through
This wicked world
Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity,
I ask myself
Is all hope lost?

Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?
And each time I feel like this inside,
There's one thing I wanna know:
What's so funny 'bout Peace, Love, & Understanding?
"I think if I am alone on a desert island I would need something lo laugh about, apart from myself, and this I think is outrageously funny, and it's everything that when I wrote about Presley I wanted to try and capture. It shows you the warmth of the man, and the wit"
About Elvis Presley
• UK playwright Alan Bleisdale, explaining to the BBC's Sue Lawley why the laughing version of Are you lonesome tonight is one of eight songs whose recordings he would take to a deserted island, as told in the BBC's long running programme "Desert Island Discs" on Sunday, 25 August 1991.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Elvis Presley" (Quotes about Presley)
This isn't funny.
I would never vote for anyone who thinks its funny to "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran".
I was once on a German talk show, and this woman said to me, "Mr. Williams, why do you think there is not so much comedy in Germany?" And I said, "Did you ever think you killed all the funny people?"
Small Change - " a poetic comedy that's really funny "
That I, a funny little gesticulating animal on two legs, should stand beneath the stars and declaim in a passion about my rights – it seems so laughable, so out of all proportion. Much better, like Archimedes, to be killed because of absorption in eternal things... There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the "intellectual love of God." Those who have known it cannot believe in wars any longer, or in any kind of hot struggle. If I could give to others what has come to me in this way, I could make them too feel the futility of fighting. But I do not know how to communicate it: when I speak, they stare, applaud, or smile, but do not understand.
I'm aware of the made up declarations about me that have recently begun to appear on the Internet and in emails as "Chuck Norris facts." I've seen some of them. Some are funny. Some are pretty far out. Being more a student of the Wild West than the wild world of the Internet, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's quite surprising. I do know that boys will be boys, and I neither take offense nor take these things too seriously. Who knows, maybe these made up one-liners will prompt young people to seek out the real facts as found in my recent autobiographical book, "Against All Odds?" They may even be interested enough to check out my novels set in the Old West, "The Justice Riders," released this month. I'm very proud of these literary efforts.
That'd be funny if you were a drummer, and you grabbed two magical wands instead of drumsticks. Be pounding out the beat "1-2-3-4 Oh shit, my bass player's now a can of soup... Sorry Rick, I mean Cream of Mushroom!"
This is funny.
Last words
• Who: Doc Holliday
• Doc Holliday was a consumptive gunfighter. He always thought, and perhaps hoped, that he would die in a fight or "with his boots on". He died in a hotel bed from tuberculosis. These last words were uttered after seeing his feet with boots off.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Last words"
It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.
And you throw your head back laughing Like a little kid. I think it's strange that you think I’m funny cause He never did. I've been spending the last 8 months Thinking all love ever does Is break and burn and end. But on a Wednesday in a cafe, I watched it begin again.
It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.
J. D. Salinger
• Source: Wikiquote: "J. D. Salinger" (Quotes, The Catcher in the Rye (1951):
All quotes are statements of Holden Caulfield unless otherwise noted. This is just a sample, for more from this work see: The Catcher in the Rye)
I'm so tired but I can't sleep, Standin' on the edge of something much too deep. It's funny how we feel so much but we cannot say a word; We are screaming inside, but we can't be heard.
Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.
What's so funny 'bout Peace, Love, and Understanding?
And you even spoke to me, and said : "If you're so funny Then why are you on your own tonight ? And if you're so clever Then why are you on your own tonight ? If you're so very entertaining Then why are you on your own tonight ? If you're so very good-looking Why do you sleep alone tonight ? I know... 'Cause tonight is just like any other night That's why you're on your own tonight With your triumphs and your charms While they're in each other's arms..."
Isn't it funny How a bear likes honey? Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! I wonder why he does?
The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.
It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings. Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose.
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
It's rainin' but there ain't a cloud in the sky; Musta been a tear from your eye. Everything'll be okay. Funny, thought I felt a sweet summer breeze; Musta been you sighin' so deep. Don't worry we're gonna find a way.
What's the matter with the crowd I'm seeing? "Don't you know that their out of touch?" Should I try to be a straight 'A' student? "If you are then you think too much. Don't you know about the new fashion honey? All you need are looks and a whole lotta money." It's the next phase, new wave , dance craze, anyways It's still rock and roll to me. Everybody's talkin' 'bout the new sound Funny, but it's still rock and roll to me.
That actually is... pretty funny...
Last words in Batman media
• Who: The Joker
• Last words as he is dying from an illness. A response to when Batman tells him that, in spite of what he has done and will no doubt do again, he would still have given him the cure and saved him.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Last words in Batman media" (Video Games, Batman: Arkham City)
Isn't it funny that at Christmas something in you gets so lonely for — I don't know what exactly, but it's something that you don't mind so much not having at other times.
It's funny how dogs and cats know the inside of folks better than other folks do, isn't it?
"Turn around, son! What a funny figure you are! Are those priests' cassocks you are wearing? And do they all go about like that at the academy?" With these words old Bulba greeted his two sons who had been studying at the Kiev college and had come home to their father.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt... Then it's hilarious.
I never dare to write As funny as I can.
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song, 'bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along
You see, dear, it is not true that woman was made from man's rib; she was really made from his funny bone.
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner, That I love London so; Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner, That I think of her wherever I go. I get a funny feeling inside of me, Just walking up and down; Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner, That I love London town.
Whoever said "Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds" was as wrong as he was funny, but there is surely a case for saying that the story of Captain Ahab's contest with the great white whale is one of those books you can't get started with even after you have finished reading them.
About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.
He was picking speed as the city spread its twinkling lights below him. But he paid no heed as the shivering thoughts of the nights delights went through him. His foot nudged the brakes to slow him down. But the pedal floored easy without a sound. He said "Christ!" It was funny how he had named the only man who could save him now. He was trapped inside a dead-end hellslide, riding on his fear-hunched back was every one of those yellow green I'm telling you thirty thousand pounds of bananas. Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Foreigners are funny
The presidency has a funny way of making a person feel the need to pray.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny."
Serendipity
• Isaac Asimov, as quoted in Becoming a Behavioral Science Researcher : A Guide to Producing Research That Matters (2008) by Rex B. Kline, p. 236
• Source: Wikiquote: "Serendipity" (Quotes: [[File:Hoag's object.jpg|thumb|right|Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult. ~ Erin McKean ]])
'There was a lot more to magic, as Harry quickly found out, than waving your wand and saying a few funny words.'
Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.
The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.
You have to have funny faces and words, you can't just have words. It is a powerful thing, and I think that's why it's hard for people to imagine that women can do that, be that powerful.
Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so irritating.
They're coming to take me away Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha To the funny farm Where life is beautiful all the time And I'll be happy to see Those nice young men in their clean white coats
It is not funny that anything else should fall down, only that a man should fall down … Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
Absurdity
• G. K. Chesterton, "Spiritualism", in All Things Considered (1908).
• Source: Wikiquote: "Absurdity" (Quotes: Alphabetized by author )
Not that I don't think irreverent humor and someone being filthy is funny, I just do what I do. Any comedian would admit throwing an f-bomb in there would help get a reaction. … I'm not on a Puritanical pursuit, but when I would curse in a joke, I believe I'm not done writing it.
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey.It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.
Now I know your mama she don't like me 'cause I play in a rock and roll band. And I know your daddy he don't dig me but he never did understand. Papa lowered the boom, he locked you in your room; I'm comin' to lend a hand. I'm comin' to liberate you, confiscate you, I want to be your man. Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny.
Mental illness is not funny.
And since, I never dare to write As funny as I can.
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the White House...
I'm a classic example of all humorists — only funny when I'm working.
Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
The predecessor of the Reform party, the Social Credit party, was very much like this. Believing in funny money and control of banking, and a whole bunch of fairly non-conservative economic things.
There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you’re angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you’re asked.
Funny the way it is, if you think about it. Somebody's going hungry, someone else is eating out. Funny the way it is, not right or wrong. Somebody's heart is broken, it becomes your favorite song.
I wanted to see Roxas. He was the only one I liked. He made me feel like I had a heart. It's kind of... funny. You make me feel... the same... Kairi's in the castle dungeon. Now go.
Last words in Kingdom Hearts series games
• Who: Axel
• Note: The character depleted all of his life energy saving Sora from a large group of Nobodies. Roxas is Sora's Nobody, who merged with him near the beginning of the game, and whom Axel had befriended during his time in Organization XIII. However, his demise has led to his revival as Lea in Dream Drop Distance, in which he aids in saving Sora from a new Organization XIII.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Last words in Kingdom Hearts series games" (Quotes, Kingdom Hearts II)
You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.
Suppose you went back to Ada Lovelace and asked her the difference between a script and a program. She'd probably look at you funny, then say something like: Well, a script is what you give the actors, but a program is what you give the audience. That Ada was one sharp lady...
"I actually like Pete as a person a lot. He is very funny, warm and charming. He has rough press and not surprisingly so. He is also very impressionable, quite vulnerable, rather too trusting and needlessly gets himself into some difficulties - basically and unfortunately for him, he is a scumbag magnet.
As an aphorist, Cioran has no rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by Ligotti. But Ligotti is far more disturbing than Cioran, who is actually very funny. In exploring these philosophies, nobody I’ve read has expressed the idea of humanity as aberration more powerfully than Cioran and Ligotti.
This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels... The day may come when "Freddy Got Fingered" is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny.
Perhaps indeed the possession of wealth is constantly distressing,
But I should be quite willing to assume every curse of wealth if I could at the same time assume every blessing.

The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can't cure,
Which is a kind of trouble that is even more troublesome if you are poor.
Certainly there are lots of things in life that money won't buy, but it's very funny
Have you ever tried to buy them without money?
I was in the middle of shooting the last few weeks of Blazing Saddles somewhere in the Antelope Valley, and Gene Wilder and I were having a cup of coffee and he said, I have this idea that there could be another "Frankenstein." I said not another — we've had the son of, the cousin of, the brother-in-law, we don't need another Frankenstein. His idea was very simple: What if the grandson of Dr. Frankenstein wanted nothing to do with the family whatsoever. He was ashamed of those wackos. I said, "That's funny."
There are many stories in Twin Peaks — some of them are sad, some funny. Some of them are stories of madness, of violence. Some are ordinary. Yet they all have about them a sense of mystery — the mystery of life. Sometimes, the mystery of death. The mystery of the woods. The woods surrounding Twin Peaks. To introduce this story, let me just say it encompasses the All — it is beyond the "Fire", though few would know that meaning. It is a story of many, but begins with one — and I knew her. The one leading to the many is Laura Palmer. Laura is the one.
It smells funny, but it works.
Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.
I was being chased by a giant crab. [Audience laughs] That's not funny.
Funny scene, likesay, how aw the psychos seem tae ken each other, ken what ah means, likes?
There are few lonelier sights than a good comedian being funny in a movie that doesn't know what funny is.
You watch your place, nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy, it ain't even funny.
Tough and funny and a little bit kind: that is as near to perfection as a human being can be.
He knew that women appreciated neither irony nor sarcasm, but simple jokes and funny stories. He was amply provided with both.
He lies in an empty room With his hair burnt to the back It sure sounds funny When you say his name like that.
It's all about money cause without money you dead Ain't a damn thing funny You gotta have a con in this land of milk and honey
I got used to dealing with groups of boys and getting on with life in unpleasant circumstances and being smart and funny and subversive at the expense of authority.
My uncles were all funny. My dad wasn’t funny, but my uncles were all funny. Now I go back and I like him better than them, they were manipulative funny.
I truly believe that when you're funny, you're blessed. Your whole life is kind of golden. I was happy, although it was not perfect happiness. There was illness and sadness and death.
I like happy things, I'm really calm and peaceful. I like birds, bees, I like people. I like funny things that make me happy and gleeful... like when my teacher sucked my wee-wee in pre-school!
Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed objectively for strength to make the flight with grace.
No, there is nothing at all funny in poverty—to the poor. It is hell upon earth to a sensitive man; and many a brave gentleman who would have faced the labors of Hercules has had his heart broken by its petty miseries.
Now everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody Else, but when it happens to you, why it seems to lose some of its Humor, and if it keeps on happening, why the entire laughter kinder Fades out of it.
Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience.
I woke last night to the sound of thunder, "How far off," I sat and wondered. Started hummin' a song from 1962. Ain't it funny how the night moves, When you just don't seem to have as much to lose. Strange how the night moves, with autumn closin' in.
I also think if you're an actor and you can improvise, when you go on an audition and you can improvise you're just a genius. If you can, you know, take a Tide commercial and you can just say one funny line that's not in the commercial they think you're a genius.
I remember being moved to tears when Peter said: "I know I was funny but I know I won't improve, I won't get any better". I was lucky to be around when he was at his peak. Verbally he was the most witty man that I have ever come across and strangely inventive.
When people say it's a funny thing about them, you will probably be able to control your hysterics. They are only getting ready to announce the shattering fact that they don't like something. And it's not going to be something that's really quite awful, like suttee or apartheid; it's going to be something small.
Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do — like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.
There was a story that some EMI execs had come down to see you and you'd said something like: "Here's what I've been working on," and then produced some cakes from your oven. True? "No! I don't know where that came from. I thought that was quite funny actually. It presents me as this homely creature, which is all right, isn't it?"
I discovered the blues in a funny kind of a way, from the age of seven when I was listening to my father’s war-time collection of big band jazz. It had that thing about it – I didn’t really know what it was –, that set the pulse racing a bit; and then I heard echoes of it again, with early Elvis Presley.
About Elvis Presley
Ian Anderson, singer, flautist and leader of Jethro Tull, explaining to G.Brown, of the Denver Music Examiner, his first experience with hearing the blues, starting at the age of 7, as published in that newspaper's online edition, on August 11, 2008.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Elvis Presley" (Quotes about Presley)
There have been a good many funny things said and written about hardupishness, but the reality is not funny, for all that. It is not funny to have to haggle over pennies. It isn't funny to be thought mean and stingy. It isn't funny to be shabby and to be ashamed of your address. No, there is nothing at all funny in poverty — to the poor.
He rarely over-sang when recording, delivering a vocal to suit the song. So, he can loudly accuse in "Hound Dog" (1956), rasp and rage for "Jailhouse Rock" (1957), bare his soul and beg on "Any Day Now" (1969) and sound quietly, sadly, worldly-wise on "Funny How Time Slips Away". (1970). This gift may explain why his music endures so powerfully and why his performances remain so easy to hear.
We were conscious of a great sense of excitement about the plan. Marshall himself was a great, great man — funny, odd but great — Olympian in his moral quality. We'd stay up all night, night after night. The first work ever done that I know about in economics on computers used the Pentagon's computers at night for the Marshall Plan. I had a tremendous sense of gratification from working so hard on it.
My first impression of Mariah was that she was an incredible singer, very funny (she's always cracking jokes) and just a very nice person to be around.... after 5 years I still feel the same way. I really enjoy being a part of her team. Normally when I work with a new artist I'm not necessarily a "fan", but there's no question Mariah is a truly great singer, so in this case, yes I was (and am) a fan.
I love her, she's such a nice person! I had an opportunity to meet her for the first time at the Z100 concert. Randy [Jackson] was like 'Mariah's here, would you like to meet her?' I said no, I don't wanna meet her! I'm gonna be an idiot in front of her. In my mind, I was saying, 'I'm gonna throw up, I'm gonna throw up!' but the words came out of my mouth. Mariah was laughing at me. It so was funny!
Sean Penn never tries to show Harvey Milk as a hero, and never needs to. He shows him as an ordinary man, kind, funny, flawed, shrewd, idealistic, yearning for a better world. He shows what such an ordinary man can achieve. Milk was the right person in the right place at the right time, and he rose to the occasion. So was Rosa Parks. Sometimes, at a precise moment in history, all it takes is for one person to stand up. Or sit down.
I could start this review by stating that Dumb and Dumberer lives up to its name, or by calling it stupid, moronic, and idiotic, but I believe that approach is a trap, since a movie like this might relish being the object of such bland invectives. Instead, let me try a few that can't possibly be misconstrued as twisted praise: unfunny, boring, torturous, and unwatchable. … [N]o movie could be more aptly compared to raw sewage than this film - Directed By Troy Miller.
A disciple asked Hejasi: - I want to know what is the most funny thing about human beings. Hejasi said: - That they always think crooked: they’re in a hurry to grow, then lament their lost childhood, and soon lose the money they need to keep their health. "They are so anxious about the future, that they neglect the present, and thus live in neither the present nor the future." "They live as if they were never going to die, and die as if they had never lived."
To me, comedies are usually the least funny movies. Movies that are actually a comedy are usually not all that funny. To me Goodfellas and Raging Bull are two of the funniest movies I ever saw. [Vulture, 2010] The Jackass movies are honestly some of the best movies I’ve ever seen. I laugh so hard at them. Those guys are geniuses. If they had grown up with a different group of people, they could’ve been performance artists at Bard College, and people would be writing papers about them.
The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit's desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement.
When I left, Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie-crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty until her mother came into the space with a broad homely smile on her face to watch me drive away. I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
[about his daughters and nieces having developed a natural curiosity about boys] When I get into the shower, there is nobody else in the bathroom. Now, when I get out there are five girls just loitering. I finally confronted them. I said "Why are all five of you in the bathroom?" And my youngest daughter, who's really funny, goes "We're trying to see a hoo-hoo!" I said "I'm gonna tell you all you need to know about hoo-hoos. Hoo-hoos are extremely poisonous." And without missing a beat, she goes "they are not, or the dog would be dead!" I hate a smart child.
I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly: "But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen! Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionately to believe such an extraordinary dictum as this? That nations are coming to believe it is manifest daily. Wave on wave, each with increasing virulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time. Its first effects are funny: the strut of the Southerner, the arrogance of the Englishman amuck, the whoop of the hoodlum who vicariously leads your mob.
"So we're all the lucky ones because we're all human. Shit happens. Deal with it. Like raining piss and stuff. Which reminds me of the time I was on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey with my friend Criss Angel who will tell you that story if you ask him - I hope he doesn't - but yeah, a seagull shit right on me right out on the boardwalk. It was funny for everyone else. I didn't think it was funny at the time, but I think it's funny now. Actually I did think it was funny at the time. But it's moments like that that kind of inspired the lyrical direction of this track because there are certainly those moments in life where you definitely think everything that could go wrong is going wrong and a lot of that is probably our own outlook. And it puts me to shame when I see people that are a little more disadvantaged and have an awesome attitude and my attitude sucks balls. So that's really what it comes down to is my own attitude. So this song is just kind of like - you know, it's kind of written to myself. Just a reminder." wrestlingwithpopculture.com July 2011 http://wrestlingwithpopculture.com/2011/celldweller-kicks-off-the-wish-upon-a-blackstar-tour-in-atlanta
Jane and Michael sat at the window watching for Mr. Banks to come home, and listening to the sound of the East Wind blowing through the naked branches of the cherry-trees in the Lane. The trees themselves, turning and bending in the half light, looked as though they had gone mad and were dancing their roots out of the ground.
"There he is!" said Michael, pointing suddenly to a shape that banged heavily against the gate. Jane peered through the gathering darkness.
"That's not Daddy," she said. "It's somebody else."
Then the shape, tossed and bent under the wind, lifted the latch of the gate, and they could see that it belonged to a woman, who was holding her hat on with one hand and carrying a bag in the other. As they watched, Jane and Michael saw a curious thing happen. As soon as the shape was inside the gate the wind seemed to catch her up into the air and fling her at the house. It was as though it had flung her first at the gate, waited for her to open it, and then had lifted and thrown her, bag and all, at the front door. The watching children heard a terrific bang, and as she landed the whole house shook.
"How funny! I've never seen that happen before," said Michael.
Boy, that's funny! (Curly Joe)
Three Stooges
• So's your face! (Moe to Curly Joe)
• You really know how to hurt a guy, Moe! (Curly Joe to Moe)
• Source: Wikiquote: "Three Stooges" (Quotes & gags)
Only man has dignity; only man, therefore, can be funny.
It's funny how innocent people tend to die around you!
It is funny, but I’m disappointed that it accentuates the shallow.
It's actually funny as hell. It makes me laugh a lot.
She thought it was funny that people thought they were important.
(After not being fooled by a fake female duck) Taint funny, McGee!
Well-travelled, hyper-educated, pissed-off, always funny, Christopher Hitchens has no equal in American journalism.
It is a difficult thing to like anybody else's ideas of being funny.
Yesterday, a funny thing happened to me on my way to the Conclave.
If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.
The reading public isn't born that doesn't think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister.
Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.
If you think this is funny, wait 'till you get into combat. You'll think that's hysterical!
Remember that show 'My Three Sons'? It'd be funny if it was called 'My One Dad'... wait, what?
It's funny how dogs and cats know the insides of folks better than other folks do, isn't it?
Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it...
I think being successful in comedy is being funny and making jokes - anything beyond that is the icing on the cake.
THE HE-ANCIENT: When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth STREPHON: Yes; and take all the fun out of it.
God writes a lot of comedy, Donna; the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.
Even when he was going through some painful times of his own, he was always incredibly funny and cheerful and always making me laugh.
I could study all my life and not think up half the amount of funny things they can think of in one Session of Congress.
Christians are a funny lot, aren't they? It doesn't seem to matter what their God does, they'll just keep on loving him regardless. (8 November 2003)
Purple haze, all in my brain Lately things just don't seem the same, Acting funny, but I don't know why, 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky.
Norbit operates on the principle that vulgarity is automatically funny. Crassness doesn't need a joke attached because it is (in and of itself) the height of hilarity.
The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that Finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny.
Stanisław Lem
 • Ch. 14: "The Old Mimoid", p. 204
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanisław Lem" (Quotes, Solaris (1961): Translation by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, 1970. Page numbers refer to the 1987 Harcourt Brace "Harvest" edition, ISBN 0156837501)
And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.
It is the American practice to present others as guilty wherever they are defeated. Is it not funny that those with 160,000 forces in Iraq accuse us of interference?"
Charlie was always preaching love. Charlie had no idea what love was. Charlie was so far from love it wasn't even funny. Death is Charlie's trip. It really is.
I asked of Echo 't other day (Whose words are few and often funny), What to a novice she could say Of courtship, love, and matrimony. Quoth Echo, plainly, — "Matter-o'-money."
I know who I am. I am just a very thin layer of charming with some funny sprinkles wrapped around a huge creamy center of raging arrogant a-hole. I got it.
It is a bit funny, but also quite sad: Those who preach the doctrine of global glut are tilting at windmills, when there are some real monsters out there that need slaying.
Our stories are funny because we lived them, and we survived them. The worse the incident was when it was happening, the funnier the story had become to us over the years.
The show was meant to last for an hour, but we extended it to two, he had that appeal. I realised he could use his funny side to promote his sporty side.
Listen, this is crazy. I look like I'm 75 years old. Nobody wants to watch an old man being funny. That's just a fact. No one wants to see this old man on TV.
You laugh at the North, you think they’re all funny little short people who live in a big pie. Trying to sort out their relationship with the definite article. Throwing darts at their dinner.
How could anybody think this man was sick? All right, so he had funny dreams. That was better than being plain mean and hateful, like about one quarter of the people she had ever met.
My writing process is editing. It's taking all the funny thoughts you've had over the last 12 months, and editing out everything that's shit. You're left with an hour and a quarter of funny stuff.
She's brilliant in the studio; I don't think I've heard anyone talk so knowledgeably about the music industry like her. She's very intelligent and very funny - it was a great honour to work with her
I guess I committed the sin of accurately quoting Ann's comments, which got her dumped by National Review, which is not exactly part of the liberal media conspiracy… But I still think Ann can be very funny.
The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing it well or you're doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That is actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.
I can't even really tell a joke. I find being funny very hard work. I am always asked about it and I feel guilty saying that, but it's the truth. I love my work but it ain't easy.
But I was confused. Here we were scrambling around looking under rocks for great long-term investments, and every other hedge fund, or so it seemed, was doing some funny hedge of cheap yen money and T-bills. That's investing?
One night I realized that when you give people understanding and encouragement a funny little meek childish look abashes their eyes, no matter what they've been doing they weren't sure it was right — lambies all over the world.
George Kaufman and I wrote a lot of funny lines for Groucho, some of which he occasionally used... but it was Groucho who by his innate sense of timing and his inimitable delivery, added the ingredient that brought the house down.
[An article about Cho] started out, "Funny, sexy, zaftig Margaret Cho..." What is "zaftig?" Isn't that German for "big fat pig?" I guess I was lucky- "zaftig" is kind of a nice word. It could have been, "Funny, sexy, OBESE Margaret Cho."
John Oliver: You've stated that you believe there could be an infinite number of parallel universes. Does that mean that there is a universe out there where I am smarter than you? Stephen Hawking: Yes. And also a universe where you're funny.
It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realize the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.
He's probably the single most untalented person I've heard in my life. He's a two-bit pretentious academic, and he can't play rock'n'roll, because he's a loser. And that's why he dresses up funny. He's not happy with himself, and I think he's right.
The actors can make up their dialogue. I'm bushed, and they're all funny, and the hell with it. Maybe I'll give them a premise to work off of, like "You're all in trouble" or "Wash has a thing". They could maybe light it too.
Everytime we got off the plane that day, three times they gave me the yellow roses of Texas. But in Dallas they gave me red roses. I thought how funny, red roses — so all the seat was full of blood and red roses.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
• Source: Wikiquote: "Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis" (Quotes, The "Camelot" interview (29 November 1963): One week after the assasination of her husband Mrs. Kennedy summoned Theodore H. White to Hyannisport for an interview. Some of the statements she made appeared in that week's edition of LIFE magazine (6 December 1963), and more of it appeared many years later in his memoir In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (1978). In 1969 White donated his notes of the interview to the Kennedy Library, to be made fully public only after Mrs. Kennedy's death. They were released on 26 May 1995.)
He's a serious mister Shake his hand and he'll twist your arm. With Monopoly money We'll be buying the funny farm. So I'll do flips, and get paid in chips From a diamond as big as the Ritz —  Then I'm calling it quits.
Iverson: Man look, I hear you... it's funny to me too, I mean it's strange... it's strange to me too, but we're talking about practice man, we're not even talking about the game... the actual game, when it matters... We're talking about practice …
What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything.
The great thing about being a comedian is that it kind of doesn't matter how you look. It's actually a disadvantage to be too good-looking. There's a Darwinian advantage to being funny. If you're a good-looking fella, you can't be bothered to make up jokes.
In 2006, Skinner responded to Black Rod's invitation with "Have you got Helen Mirren on standby?", in reference to the portrayal by Helen Mirren of Elizabeth II in the 2006 film, The Queen. The BBC political commentator Huw Edwards called the quip "cheap but funny".
About Dennis Skinner
• Source: Wikiquote: "Dennis Skinner" (Queen's Speech Quips: Skinner has traditionally cracked jokes, usually about the Royal Family, during the annual Queen's Speech ceremony. He does this upon the arrival of Black Rod (the symbol of Royal authority in the House of Commons) to summon MPs to hear the Queen's speech in the House of Lords. The best known, according to the New Statesman and other sources, are as follows (http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/05/black-rod-skinner-queen-beast):)
Bobby: Don't forget the camera flash hit Hogan right in the eye. And Hogan, if your sitting on there in the back listening, remember, Hulk, we'll keep an eye out for you. HA HA HA HA!
Jim Ross: Oh, Bobby, that's sickening! It's not even funny.
The journalist researches a story. The novelist imagines it. What’s funny is, you’d be amazed at the amount of time a novelist has to spend with people in order to create this single lonely voice. This seemingly isolated world. It’s hard to call any of my novels “fiction.”
I'm so sick of the brainless overpraise of her shrill show. She's oafishly unfunny and phony to boot. I liked her as a newcomer stand-up comedian, but her humor's become adolescent and predictable. And that forced Long Island accent that she no longer has in real life — ugh!
I write jokes for a living, I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny.
And I can tell you that your courage and the sheer exuberant nerve with which you stuck it to your enemies, especially in New Labour, you have thereby earned the thanks and admiration of millions of Londoners, even if you think that they have a funny way of showing it today.
It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you.
So I watched the Pink Panther last night, and so I'm trying desperately to be funny, and then it's just not working out so good... I wonder if maybe I could've been a comedian or something like that, or maybe I could've been a doctor, then I wouldn't have to make anyone laugh.
"Hi, I'm one of the knife-carrying hooligans you met last night in Pandemonium? I'm afraid I made a bad impression and was hoping you'd give me a chance to make it up to- " "SIMON!" Clary held the phone away from her ear as he cracked up laughing. "That is so not funny!"
I later saw Afande Tugume on television saying funny things. I don't know whether it was his accent or he meant it but instead of saying: "The match was unfair!", he said: "The match was an affair!". Now my girlfriend wants to call off our kwanjula because of his statements on national television.
"Years ago, farmers were uneducated and eccentric and said funny things, and we ourselves were comparatively uneducated. We had no antibiotics, few drugs. A lot of time was spent pouring things down cows' throats. The whole thing added up to a lot of laughs. There's more science now, but not so many laughs." On retirement
And when the music goes te-toot, The monkey acts so funny That we all hurry up and scoot To get some monkey-money. M-double-unk for the monkey, M-double-an for the man; M-double unky, hunky monkey, Hunkey monkey-man. Ever since the world began Children danced and children ran When they heard the monkey-man, The m-double-unky man.
Music
• Edmund Vance Cooke, The Monkey-Man, I rule the House.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Music" (Quotes, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 535-41.)
"You said not to do anything that might accidentally contribute to the apocalypse. I know you were joking. But it's less funny when I can't rid myself of the feeling that the apocalypse is coming, somehow. Valentine Morgenstern nearly wiped out the Shadowhunters, and his son is twice as clever and six times as evil."
Nell: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.Nagg: Oh?Nell: Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.
I have a theory, that there is a terrific link between what is funny and what is scary. I think there is a very close connection between what frightens people and what makes them laugh. Laughter is a kind of nervousness. Animals don't laugh. Smiling is, anthropologists agree, directly linked to the baring of the teeth.
I never had much of a vocabulary. In fact, my friend Bob Schneider would still be alive today if I'd known the difference between "antidote" and "anecdote". He got bitten by a copperhead, and I'm telling him funny stories out of Reader's Digest. His head started to swell, I said "This ain't working". He goes, "READ FASTER!!"
I detest jokes – when somebody tells me one I feel my IQ dropping; the brain cells start to disappear. But something is funny when the person delivering the line doesn’t know it’s funny or doesn’t treat it as a joke. Maybe it comes from a place of truth, or it’s a sort of rage against society.
"Yes, him - Quirell said he hates me because he hated my father. Is that true?" "Well, they did rather detest each other. Not unlike yourself and Mr Malfoy. And then, your father did something Snape could never forgive." "What?" "He saved his life." "What?" "Yes ..." said Dumbledore dreamily. "Funny, the way people's minds work, isn't it?"
Ayurveda is not a weird diet and the practitioners are not really tree-hugging woo-woos with an extreme affinity for Mother Nature (they're normal people who take really good care of themselves & their communities). Funny how we make-up expectations & judgments about things before we even try them. – Ayurvedic wisdom leads to more profitable and passionate work.
The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian. I would not call him the greatest Darwinian
Ernst Mayr
• First response to the following remark by EDGE: It seems to me that Darwin is much better known in England than in the United States. Books about Darwin sell well and people debate the subjects. Here in America what passes for intellectual life doesn't necessarily include reading and having an appreciation of Darwin.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Ernst Mayr" (Quotes, What evolution is: Talk with Ernst Mayr (2001): Ernst Mayr, Jared Diamond (2001) What evolution is: Talk with Ernst Mayr on edge.org, October 31, 2001.)
Nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face. So what they are going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know he — oh, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all of those other presidents on those dollar bills.
"You do not have to present not-truths to me, Sasha. I am not a child."(But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths in order to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.)
I'm not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them. And that's not funny. … OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire.
You know the funny thing about child pornography: [...] the lack of credits at the end. No ego on that side of Hollywood, is there? “Who did the editing on this film, it's seamless! I want to use him on my independent documentary”— but no names. Not even a nom de plume. Some people are in it just for the art.
Robin Williams was beloved by the U.S. military, perhaps even more so than by the American public. He carried Bob Hope’s mantle as a funny man far from home, often in inhospitable places. Throughout his career, Williams made six USO tours to Iraq, Afghanistan, and 11 other countries and performed for 90,000 troops by the time of his final tour in 2010.
Before seeing Truffaut's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid — I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity — a poetic comedy that's really funny.
On my Youtube page there are so many haters. They just say crazy stuff. Like, I'm not mad. I'm 16 years old and I don't have chest hair and I'm not angry about it at the moment. That will come. People are like, "Look at him he puts helium in his voice before he sings." You just have to laugh at yourself. It's funny.
Politically Incorrect was the name of the show Bill Maher hosted in the 1990s. It's also an apt description of the man himself. Now host of … HBO's hit show Real Time, I find Maher to be one of the sharpest observers of American politics and life in general out there. It doesn't mean I always agree with him. I always find him funny, though.
Nannie Bruce, a tall, gangling light-heavyweight with a suggestion in her appearance of a private in the Grenadiers dressed up to play the title role in Charley’s Aunt, was one of those doggedly faithful retainers who adhere to almost all old families like barnacles to the hulls of ships...She was as much a fixture as the stone lions or the funny smell in the attic.
Sometimes people associate getting big with selling out, which is funny because that's not something you necessarily have choice in. That's not a matter that is entirely up to you and at the same time, who hasn't sold out? If you've heard of a specific artist, they're big enough--they got to you. Where do you draw the line between what's big and what's too big?
I am not a comic, I have never told a joke...The comedian's promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him...My only promise is that I will try to entertain you as best I can....They say, 'Oh wow, Andy Kaufman, he's a really funny guy.' But I'm not trying to be funny. I just want to play with their heads."
I think Terrell will catch hell at the sound of the bell. He's going around saying that he's a championship-fighter, but when he meets me he fall 20 pound lighter. He thinks that he's the real heavy weight champ but when he meets me, he'll just be a tramp Now I'm not sayin' just to be funny, but I'm fightin' Ernie because he needs the money.
Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn't bother you any more.
Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, so it doesn't bother you any more.
The truth is, as I have said, that in this sense the two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other, they are no more comparable than black and triangular. Mr. Bernard Shaw is funny and sincere. Mr. George Robey is funny and not sincere. Mr. McCabe is sincere and not funny. The average Cabinet Minister is not sincere and not funny.
I've never claimed that this is investment art. When we first started out, all the art colleges and universities across the country would sort of badmouth what we were doing. It's funny that a lot of them now are sending us letters saying, 'We may not totally agree with the way you paint, but we appreciate what you're doing, because you're sending literally thousands of people into art colleges.'
Vlaminck and Utrillo were very good friends, drinking buddies. One day they attend a funeral. They're walking behind the hearse in a procession, and they're having a great time conversing with one another. They are completely engrossed when suddenly one asks the other, 'Say, don't you smell something funny?' They look up and they're walking behind a garbage truck! They'd lost the hearse in the middle of their enthusiastic conversation.
I play a lot of those parts, and it's a chicken-and-egg thing. I don't know whether you get scary because you play those parts or did you get those parts because you were scary? But I do believe that there's a very close connection to what's scary and what's funny. So I think if you have the ability to do one, you might have the ability to do the other.
It's funny how the music industry is enraged about the Internet and the way things are copied without being paid for. But you know why people steal the music? Because they can't afford the music. I'm not condoning downloading music for free. I don't think that's really fair, but I understand it. If you brought CD prices back down to $8.98, you would solve a lot of the industry's problems.
It was a warm day and he had a long way to go. He hadn't gone more than half-way when a sort of funny feeling began to creep all over him. It began at the tip of his nose and trickled all through him and out at the soles of his feet. It was just as if somebody inside him were saying "Now then, Pooh, time for a little something".
Its funny no one ever applies the term "progressive rock" to Kate Bush, but to me its prog. It's the same think I love about the best prog, it's like, the really sort of brash stuff, people showing technical ability, I have no interest in, but the experimental dreamy stuff, that sort of came from many places at once, I set her stuff next to, well next to Janis, is the obvious comparison…
Walter: Dehehe-eh!
Jeff: You know you don't have to do this.
Walter: Yeah I can get a real job.
Jeff: (chuckles) What would you do?
Walter: I wanna be a greeter at Wal-Mart. (audience starts to laugh as Walter stares them down) What the hell's so funny?!
Jeff: At Wal-Mart, what would be your opening line?
Walter: Oh. (clears throat) Welcome to Wal-Mart! Get your shit and get out! ...Have a nice day!
Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. The question of whether a man expresses himself in a grotesque or laughable phraseology, or in a stately and restrained phraseology, is not a question of motive or of moral state, it is a question of instinctive language and self-expression.
I am s-stiff; Medusa has looked at me; I'm turning into a pillar of salt. That'd be funny if, like, you know how Medusa, if you looked at her you turned into a pillar of salt, like if you were eating and, like, "This isn't very salty. Hey, dude, look at that snake-haired bitch! … Thank you... Hmm, not bad now; thanks, snake-haired bitch! I'd like to make eye contact, but it's salty enough."
I still don't look at movies twice. It's funny, I just feel I got it the first time. With music it's different. People respond so differently to the whole issue of seeing a movie many times. I'm astonished when I talk to really good critics, who know their stuff and will see a film eight or ten or twelve times. I don't see how they can do it without hating the movie. I would.
For years, we had watched with awe as a Niagara of wit poured from his unconscious. Where did that manic waterfall of funny have its source? … Unfortunately, sometimes the mind that runs so fast it can’t keep up with itself also has its downtime. I didn’t know he suffered from depression, although it doesn’t surprise me. But it makes me want to do something. I hope it makes us all want to do something.
Her life is almost a perfect blending of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have ever written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny. Well Simone Weil's is the most comical life I have ever read about, and the most truly tragic and terrible.
In the 1970s I was amazed to be talked about as a ’60s sex symbol. I wasn’t that person, as if I were a doll from the past. I had to learn to come to terms with that. It’s funny, it’s silly, the ridiculousness of having asked so much of celebrity. Then it becomes really interesting and very much part of the excitement of the life you’re living now, knowing you’re approaching the end of it.
It's a natural aspect of the marketplace. It's always been that way in storytelling. The guy who was good at playing the lover plays the lover, the funny guy gets the comic role. Movies are so expensive, when they put them together they want to have a couple of solid blocks in what they're building. I accept that. In theater, though, I tend to look for other things, I think I tend to be best in comedy.
Groucho appeals on so many levels at once that you could go nuts trying to figure out whether it's the funny movement, the incomparable tone of voice, what he is saying, or that keenly witty face that hits you the hardest. I swear that if he never existed, we would sense a lack in the world of comedy, like that planet in the solar system that astronomers say Ought to be there. For me he is The Master.
Every band should study Queen at Live Aid. If you really feel like that barrier is gone, you become Freddie Mercury. I consider him the greatest frontman of all time. Like, it's funny? you'd imagine that Freddie was more than human, but … You know how he controlled Wembley Stadium at Live Aid in 1985? He stood up there and did his vocal warm ups with the audience. Something that intimate, where they realize, 'Oh yeah, he's just a f**
She became a singer, and it was an extraordinary kind of example — graphic example — of what a good actor can really do, you know. She spent a lot of research time, she went around and heard singers and studied what they did. Everything from, of course, all the body language and all of that stuff — but vocally, we went in the studio and she sang a version of My Funny Valentine that, I mean... it killed me.
To all the young women here tonight, and all across the country, let me say those words again: Black girls rock! We rock! We rock! No matter who you are, no matter where you come from, you are beautiful, you are powerful, you are brilliant, you are funny! Let me tell you, I'm so proud of you. My husband, your president, is so proud of you. And we have such big hopes and dreams for every single one of you.
And then a funny thing happened to me...except when I think about it, it wasn't very funny at all. There must be a line in all of us, a very clear one, just like the line that divides the light side of a planet from the dark. I think they call that line the terminator. That's a very good word for it. Because at that moment I was freaking out, and at the next I was as cool as a cucumber.
His playing . . . is one of those rare things that may only come once in a lifetime and even not in one person's life, it may be centuries before there is anyone like that again. He is a funny little fellow only about 30 and plays with his eyes shut practically the whole time, every note every pause and tone colour is reflected in his face and to hear him again, to draw the bow across is a revelation.
When I wrote my book, LOVE, it was really funny, because my publisher said, "Oh, Leo, you're going to have to change the name because I'm sure that someone has used that name before." I said, "Why don't you send it in and see what happens?" So we sent it in and I got the "copyright" for LOVE! No one had ever thought of a book called simply Love. L-O-V-E. Such a good word. Such a limitless word. Such a limitless concept.
Talking of skulls, I am also aware of the story of the Cro-Magnon skull that was much larger and finer than a modern skull. It is a very funny story; because an eminent evolutionist, awakening to a somewhat belated caution, protested against anything being inferred from one specimen. It is the duty of a solitary skull to prove that our fathers were our inferiors. Any solitary skull presuming to prove that they were superior is felt to be suffering from swelled head.
Boat Trip arrives preceded by publicity saying many homosexuals have been outraged by the film. Now that it's in theaters, everybody else has a chance to join them. Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too much. It is dim-witted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive, and way too conventional to use all of those people standing around in the background wearing leather and chains and waiting hopefully for their cues. This is a movie made for nobody, about nothing.
I find this varies considerably from near-death experience to near-death experience. For example, having a wandering loonie break down the door of my game store to look for women was so funny the entire concussion and pools of blood thing was a minor footnote. Being sucked out into the Atlantic by an undertow was deeply irritating. Having a snowba[n]k collapse on me was alarming because of the claustrophobia issue. The car wreck was over almost before I had time to realise what was happening.
The funny thing about our act is that dad gets the worst of it, although I'm the one who apparently receives the bruises … the secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat. Imitators of our act don't last long, because they can't stand the treatment.
The Times Square Incident wasn't a terrorist attack, it was a Jim Carrey movie. The terrorist locked the keys to the safe house he was going to escape to in the carbomb. And I love that he locked the carbomb. "Nobody's getting my Ipod." Then he left the keys to carbomb hanging out of the tailgate of the carbomb, and built the carbomb out of fertilizer that wouldn't explode. I have been doing comedy for 25 years and I have NEVER been that funny.
The man can write. He has lived a life. He has seen for himself, making it a point to travel regularly to dangerous and wretched nations. He has been a man of political passion, beginning first as a Trotskyite and becoming in recent years a supporter of the Neocon war in Iraq. … He exists as that most daring of writers, a freelance intellectual. He's a good speaker, can be funny, has bad teeth, is passably good-looking, and is at no pains to be a charmer.
Suddenly it was all different, what I did had a value that made people ready to pay, up to that time everything I did had a value because nobody was ready to pay. It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you.
"My mother told me I said to her, at age three, 'I'm going to go to Italy and get my father in a tractor.' 'You've never seen quite so fierce a little boy as you were,' she told me. She tried to explain that I couldn't get my father in a tractor. Apparently I looked at her and narrowed my eyes and said 'In that case, I'm going in a double-decker bus,' and stomped off. Which is kind of funny, but it's very sad, as well."
The point is that there isn't a canonical James Nicoll tale. The point is that whenever a discussion turns to some manner in which a human being can be menaced, injured, or potentially killed, it will turn out that James has already had it happen to him. No matter how funny, unlikely, wierd (sic)), or pedestrian. He hasn't said he has a scar on his arm from being attacked by aliens with laser swords, but I would be only mildly surprised if he did. And I'd believe him.
… they said, "Sir, we want to tell you a joke." I said, "You don't have time to tell me a joke." They said, "Oh, you gotta hear this one." So I came in, they shut the door, and they said, "Here's"— I said, "What's the joke?" I said, "What's the joke?" They said, "9/11. Saddam Hussein. If he didn't do it, too bad. He should've! Because we're gonna get him anyway." I said, "But that's not funny." I said, "That's not very funny." They said, "It sure isn't."
Boris Johnson is the most dangerous politician in Britain, precisely because of his charm. The politicians who want to move the party and our country further to the right want Boris. And well they might: he is the consummate televisual politician. Funny and likable, even when he errs it's cute, like a shaved Winnie the Pooh accidentally eating all the honey. In this age where politics is presented as entertainment, it's the most entertaining politicians who ascend Russell Brand and the GQ awards: 'It's amazing how absurd it seems'
He was kind of forbidden fruit in a way. Everybody thinks of the '60s as being nothing but radicals and hippies and crazy people, but when you were going to school, people discouraged you from listening to people like Phil Ochs or Bob Dylan, or reading Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg... He was seen as this of radical which is really kind of funny. When you look back, his message was so humanistic, how could it possibly have seemed so radical? He was singing for equality and freedom and the end of war.
Pfeiffer's characterization of Lurene is a marvel, but by now that is only to be expected. Watching her discover new facets of her talent is one of the real pleasures of going to the movies these days... Pfeiffer has become one of those transparent actors, a performer who allows us direct access to her character's thoughts and feelings. This character is simply another in her wide-ranging gallery of vivid, complex women. She's fully alive up there on the screen: a grounded angel, tarnished, funny and exquisitely soulful, even when the movie is dead.
With the possible exception of What's Up, Tiger Lily (1966), the schlocky Japanese spy movie to which he attached his own, sidesplitting English soundtrack, no Woody Allen movie has ever been more or less serious than another of his works. He's always been serious. It's the audiences who have been frivolous. In Zelig he reassures us that he can still be funny and moving without making the sort of insistent filmic references in which he delights but which can be infuriating to others. Zelig is a nearly perfect — and perfectly original — Woody Allen comedy.
And in these battle if we won. arabism win. Thriumphing of arab nationalism triumphing the arab nation from occupied Ceuta and Melilla to Bagdad these the land where you are standing holly ground ... and he continue: "They said Gaddafi went to Honolulu, haha it's funny, it's funny, I have my grandpas graves, the martyrs and I have my people. is that possible? My people who's sacrificed for me, his people ready to die for me and I am ready to die for my people I am ready to be the first one in all battles" - Jul 16, 2011 - Muammar Gaddafi selected speach is from 1:58
Contrary to several conflicting stories, I got the name "Count" right in Kansas City in 1936 while at the Reno Club. I was known as Bill Basie at that time. One night, while we were broadcasting, the announcer called me to the microphone for those usual few words of introduction. He commented that Bill Basie was a rather ordinary name, and further that there were a couple of well-known bandleaders named Earl Hines and Duke Ellington. Then he said, "Bill, I think I'll call you Count Basie from now on. Is that all right with you?" I thought he was kidding, shrugged my shoulders and replied, "OK." Well that was the last time I was ever introduced as Bill Basie. From then on, it was Count Basie, and I never did lose that nickname. It's funny the way those things will stick.
The first half of your life is spent getting over yourself. You think you’re amazing, unique. Young people walk around going, "You know the funny thing is I was just in the kitchen but now I’m here in the bedroom, get a load of me! I just go on and on!" And that’s around the age when you meet somebody else – when you’re totally unbearable. Two young, fit, healthy attractive people in love? There’s nothing worse to look at in the world! Going around going, "I can’t believe I met you cause you’re amazing and I’m amazing and we’re surrounded by shitheads, it’s just amazing! Hey, I know this really good bar, let’s go and make it better." In the second half of your life you realise how like every other hump who drew breath you really are. Except you’re MORE boring.
Something was in Debs, seemingly, that did not come out unless you saw him. I'm told that even those speeches of his which seem to any reader indifferent stuff, took on vitality from his presence. A hard-bitten socialist told me once, "Gene Debs is the only one who can get away with the sentimental flummery that's been tied onto Socialism in this country. Pretty nearly always it gives me a swift pain to go around to meetings and have people call me 'comrade.' That's a lot of bunk. But the funny part of it is that when Debs says 'comrade' it is all right. He means it. That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that's not the funniest part of it. As long as he's around I believe it myself."
The result is a horrible mess of a movie, without shape, trajectory or purpose — a one joke movie, if it had one joke. The two characters wander witlessly past the bizarre backdrops of Las Vegas (some real, some hallucinated, all interchangeable) while zonked out of their minds. Humor depends on attitude. Beyond a certain point, you don't have an attitude, you simply inhabit a state. I've heard a lot of funny jokes about drunks and druggies, but these guys are stoned beyond comprehension, to the point where most of their dialog could be paraphrased as "eh?"… As for Depp, what was he thinking he made this movie? He was once in trouble for trashing a New York hotel room, just like the heroes of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. What was that? Research? After River Phoenix died of an overdose outside Depp's club, you wouldn't think Depp would see much humor in this story — but then, of course, there *isn't* much humor in this story.
I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. To which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things. They always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old. And I reply and say, "Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing.
"The Batman taught me, guided me, trained me. What I am I owe to him. What more can I say? And Superman. I grew up in your shadow, too. You taught me honor, selflessness, and the true meaning of the word 'hero.' … I'm the sum of so many people who have influenced me, shaped my thinking, and given me love. Mom and Dad, you were the first … what you gave me will never leave. It's forever locked in my heart and in my soul. Batman, you took in a young, frightened boy. And you showed him how to become a good man. Kory, it's so funny. I spent the better part of last year fighting to forget what made me me. I almost alienated everyone, but you stuck by me and I love you for that. I gave up being Robin because that tied me to Batman. But now I become someone new who commemorates all those who made me someone special." (Tales of the Teen Titans #44, 1984; by Marv Wolfman).
Well what happened was I was asked to be on Seinfeld. They said: “Would you do a Seinfeld?” And I said, and I just happened to know to see a few Seinfelds and I knew these guys were really tops; they were really, really clever guys, and I liked the show. And so I said “Sure!” and I thought they would ask me to do a walk-on, the way it came: "Would you come be part of the show?" And I said “Yeah, sure I’ll do it.” You know what I mean? Then I got the script and my name was on every page because it was about my car. And I laughed; it was hysterically funny. So I was really delighted to do it. The writer came up to me and he said “Jon, would you come take a look at my car to see if you ever owned it?”, because the writer wrote it from a real experience where someone sold him the car based on the fact that it was my car. And I went down and I looked at the car and I said “No, I never had this car.” So unfortunately I had to give him the bad news. But it was a funny episode.
So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde. . .puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow. . .oppressed.
I didn't just start doing this today. Not like some people that have a movie coming out, so they go visit kids in the hospital. You don't need that phony crap. All of these celebrities, they turn my stomach with their funny stuff. I've been going in the ghettos without the press, without bodyguards, talking to kids. "Get to reading, stay in school. You don't have to carry a gun." I know about peer pressure and all that, but I say, "Hey, they called me a sissy because I wouldn't join a gang. Who was calling me a sissy? Does it make me a sissy because somebody called me a sissy?" [...] I'm going to fight if you touch me or hurt me or do harm to my family. But if you call me a bad name, or whatnot, I'm too smart for that. That's the message the kids need to hear coming from me. I tell them, "If I fought every time somebody called me a name, I would never get out of jail. But I'm disciplined. I'm smarter than that." So I tell them, like my mother said, "Consider the source." When you see who called you the name, then you understand why they're doing it. Then you don't have to stoop that low.
We on the left keep dividing ourselves into little splinter groups. "Anyone who isn't a vegetarian is automatically evil!" "Anyone who isn't an environmentalist wants to pollute the world!" "If you're not gay, then you must be homophobic!" "Look at me wrong? You're a racist!" "Wear lipstick? You can't be a feminist!" Divide, Divide, Divide, Divide, Divide! And while the left is all up their own asses with their little pet causes, the right comes in and takes control over that which is rightly everyone's. And speaking of splinters, most pathetic of all: "The only thing that matters in the entire universe is the punk rock scene! And you're an evil, sell-out traitor to the sacred punk rock scene if you disagree with anything I say, listen to music that I don't like, dress funny, dress normal, laugh without permission, or even so much as speak to another artist who ever made a dime off of their years of hard work without at least beating them up first!"...how pathetic is that? Every day, I walk from my home to the offices of Alternative Tentacles, and I lose count of the number of people, including entire families, holding up cardboard signs saying "Homeless: Will Work for Food"! Hard as it may be for some crybabies to believe, people in that situation could care less that "Green Day and The Offspring sold out when they signed to major labels."! Other things are more important!
Oh, Doug, you're funny.
Sometimes the future isn't funny.
ACT FUNNY OR I`LL ZAP
Everything's funny for God's sake. Everything.
Allen, Steve. Funny People (1981). ISBN 0812827643.
That's not funny. That's not... (gasp)... (uncut)
Private Perkins is a funny little codger.
What's so funny about i don't get it...
Not funny, not funny says she, didn't like it!
Moonlighting was funny, innovative, genre-busting chaos. Also, apparently, unsustainable. Sigh.
“Babydoll, when ain’nuthin funny, eat what’s sweet. That’s my philosophy.”
Millie: "Kittypet". That's funny! Are you new in the neighborhood, Graystripe?
He makes a funny sound in the back of his throat
Practical enough to leave the people who do the funny stuff alone.
The world is a dark place, and I find it endlessly funny.
TRAFFIC JAMS CHALLENGE THE DRIVERS AROUND YOU IN A FUNNY FACES CONTEST
The nine Wise Words are full of wisdom, besides being decidedly funny.
Isn't it funny how everyone manages to die except me?  - The Grandmother
It was very funny how George Stanner lost his arm in the mangler.
Being funny is a gift, and, when done well, is an art form.
Fences and forts with walls and flags, caw caw — they’re so funny.
What Men Would Say When Male-Bashing Is Called “Funny,” But Female-Bashing Is Called “Sexist”
Draco Malfoy: You’re dead, Potter.
Harry Potter: Funny, you’d think I’d have stopped walking around…
LIFE// FUNNY HOW YOU ALWAYS START LOOKING FOR THE MEANING OF IT/ AFTER FIVE BEERS
Thinking and Thought: Thoughts are funny little things, They can make paupers or make kings.]]
When dumb and dumber are running organizations, corporations, and government agencies, it's not funny anymore.
I find it funny to praise myself, but I think I am beautiful, just like Chandramukhi.
Virgil: (studying his 'breakfast' with his fork) Funny, I don't remember needing a straw to eat her's.
Static Shock
• Source: Wikiquote: "Static Shock" (Season One, Shock To The System: (opening of the episode; a trio of theives are looting an electronics warehouse.))
I just draw what I think is funny, and I hope other people think it is funny, too.
Imelda Magsaysay: (laughs) So funny, that woman! She wears funny costumes! Anong akala niya sa mundo, Cartoon Network?
Funny, I never shopped. Even my jewelry — not a piece of my jewelry I bought for me.
Shiv: (covering for himself) Hahahaha, that's a funny story, Ebon, (pushes Talon forward,) why don't you tell him.
Static Shock
• Source: Wikiquote: "Static Shock" (Season Two, Bad Stretch: (Virgil and Richie are inside the 'Abandoned Gas Station of Solitude'; Virgil is setting up for a demonstration of his newest application for his powers, positioning a length of wire in and out of between his fingers like a cat's cradle, channeling a charge of electricity through them.))
Nails: (raises her hands up threateningly, her elongated, extra sharp nails into Harley's immediate line-of-sight) This isn't funny!
“I suspect that drink has made you impulsive.“ “Drink makes me see funny; the gods made me impulsive.“
He stuck a camera down my throat....ewwww, I gagged!!! It was kinda funny though.....he said I have "Acute Laryngitis".
Hurts so bad that you know it's not sinning. The funny thing is it's just beginning to feel good.
Sphinx: See you in the funny papers. Of course, if you're in them, they can't be all that funny.
You put out a funny podcast, you talk about bak chor mee. I will say mee siam mai hum.
Relax, you're among friends now. The long hard day is over and the roly-poly funny man is before you.
The three-toed tree-toad Sings his sweet ode To the moon; The funny bunny And his honey Trip in tune.
And you're not happy but you're funny and I'm tripping over my joy. I just keep on gettin up again.
It’s a funny thing, when you talk to God, you’re religious, but when he talks to you, you’re a psychopath.
I got attention by being funny at school, pretending to be retarded, and jumping around with a deformed hand. http://www.flixster.com/actor/leonardo-di-caprio/leonardo-dicaprio-quotes
A comedian is not a person who opens a funny door — he's the person who opens a door funny.
Chuck Jones
• John Lewell, "The Art of Chuck Jones: John Lewell Interviews the Veteran Hollywood Animator [1982]," in Animation - Art and Industry, ed. Maureen Furniss (John Libby Publishing Ltd., 2009), 134.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Chuck Jones" (Quotes)
The Bible is the funniest book I have ever read. It's so funny! Right in the first six pages, it's funny!
Richie: (sarcasticly to himself) Ahh, that's funny. (to Virgil) Hey, I'd have built us a treehouse if I had a tree.
Static Shock
• Source: Wikiquote: "Static Shock" (Season One, They're Playing My Song: (Virgil and Richie are walking down an empty street through an area of a city block with abandoned and condemned buildings.))
That's the funny thing about arriving somewhere, Vin. Once you're there, the only thing you can really do is leave again
It was a great game, and exciting and dramatic and even at times tragic - but funny it emphatically was not.
I sometimes get a funny feeling, that Alicia Witt has to shut down half her cerebellum to have a conversation with me.
It's funny how people are pickin' up on our music now, you know? I think it's wonderful that people like our music.
Hitching up the M11 coming back from a Dexys gig got picked up 'bout half eleven by this bloke in a funny wig
Attila the Stockbroker
• "Contributory Negligence", from Cautionary Tales for Dead Commuters (1985)
• Written for a judge who said a raped woman hitchhiker had been guilty of "contributory negligence". In the poem, Attila hitches a lift with a judge, attacks him and uses the ruling in his defence.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Attila the Stockbroker" (Sourced)
You're a coward, James.
You're running away from humanity.
You're running away from reality.
It won't be funny when they rat-a-tat-tat you down. Feel It
You are so funny to ask me about "The Look". I've been asked many times, and I really am not sure what anyone means.
I like drama. I love being in a drama where I get to be the funny guy. That's what I really love the most.
She almost succeeded in inspiring the creation of the adjective 'saganesque', which one might translate as nostalgic and funny, deceptively frivolous and very lucid.
Funny thing about Americans. They are the first to adopt weird lifestyles and radical views but they are the most conservative race on earth.
I might be trying to change the world, but I also better be funny while I'm doing it. I've never lost sight of that.
Bill Nye
• Bill Buell (March 9, 2005), Bill Nye, the Science Guy, brings humor to normally serious field work: The Daily Gazette, page: D-01, place: Schenectady, New York
• Source: Wikiquote: "Bill Nye" (Quotes)
Tim Guest’s extraordinary account of his childhood in the communes of Bhagwan [Rajneesh], the notorious Indian guru, is a survivor’s tale, poignant, funny and wise.
What is this thing called love?
This funny thing called love?

Just who can solve this mystery?
Why should it make a fool of me?
I'm not as funny as Chandler is. Because Chandler has thirty people writing for him. - Matthew Perry na revista "GQ" Novembro de 2000 .
Always warm up the audience with a joke....If you are not a particularly funny person, make sure that you inform them that it's a joke....
I can be educational, but if I'm not funny and entertaining, too, who's going to come and listen to me or watch me on TV.
Bill Nye
• Bill Buell (March 9, 2005), Bill Nye, the Science Guy, brings humor to normally serious field work: The Daily Gazette, page: D-01, place: Schenectady, New York
• Source: Wikiquote: "Bill Nye" (Quotes)
People ask what I am really trying to do with humor. The answer is, "I'm getting even." … For me, being funny is the best revenge.
Young players are a little bit like melons. Only when you open and taste the melon are you 100% sure that the melon is good. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/funny_old_game/7004282.stm
Anything above 40 is a little too old for me. I just look for a girl who is funny and has nice eyes and a smile.
It would be nice to be unfailingly, perpetually, remorselessly funny, day in and day out, year in and year out until somebody murdered you, now wouldn't it?
As a rule people don’t think other people on drugs are funny. They think they are tragic. They have a point, but I still had the funny.
Comedy should never be over-analysed. It's either funny or it isn't. There's a subtle difference between those who say funny things and those who say things funny.
The fairy stitching gleams On the sides and in the seams, And it shows That Pixies were the wags Who tipped these funny tags And these toes.
Shoemaking
• Frederick Locker-Lampson, To My Mistress's Boots.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Shoemaking" (Sourced, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 705-06.)
I'm an educator. You do what you have to do to get what you are saying across, and if that means being funny, that's what I do.
Bill Nye
• Associated Press (June 8, 2005), 'The Science Guy' returns to tackle issues for older audience work: Journal Gazette, place: Mattoon, Illinois
• Source: Wikiquote: "Bill Nye" (Quotes)
I love the anonymity of being Mr Smith. If I book a hotel it's actually very funny. It's very nice to be a genuine Mr Smith (Q 2000)
I think the obsession with my hair is funny. People copy my hair. At meet and greets, people touch my hair. I don’t have any product in it.
As far as I'm concerned we are all God
That's the difference
If you really think another guy is God he doesn't lock you up

Funny about that.

The All
• Ram Dass, in Be Here Now (1971), contrasting the attitude of those who think they are especially "divine" and thus believe other people "owe" them deference — and those who think all are divine manifestions of "The All", and thus are respectful of others and their rights.
• Source: Wikiquote: "The All" (Quotes: Alphabetized by author or source)
There is something about a blurb-writer paying his respects to a funny book which puts one in mind of a short-sighted lord mayor raising his hat to a hippopotamus.
"I actually was class clown, but I don't know how that happened because I've never been considered an outwardly funny person — as the people in this room will attest."
Me, as myself, I don't think I'm particularly funny. But I've noticed that people in my life always have found me amusing. Which, when I was little, really bothered me.
I've played Bach since I was a little girl. I can't let a day go by without playing him. He's so witty and secretive and funny and mathematical and brilliant.
Mad about the boy, It's pretty funny but I'm mad about the boy. He has a gay appeal That makes me feel There may be something sad about the boy.
It's funny how worms can turn leaves into silk. But funnier far is the cow: She changes a field of green grass into milk And not a professor knows how.
Not everybody knows that looking at people in 'a funny way' is the commonest cause of sudden murder. I happen to know that because I read a Home Office brochure once.
Duke Hilam: "I've heard about your bad manners, Alan of Trebond." Alanna: "Funny. I always heard the men from Tusaine possessed some trace of honor. Isn't it odd how rumors lie?"
Your back always looked small and weak but we could laugh together at funny stories. But if people keep making the same mistakes over and over can they really regret them?
The French have no sense of humor or irony. The last truly funny comedian to have made merry in France lived in the 17th century. He was Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Molière.
It's a funny thing about weaknesses....Most people will tell you they know their weaknesses. When asked, they'll tell you, 'Well for one thing, I'm overgenerous.' ... that's what innkeepers are for.
Why did it become so successful? Maybe because the basic rules that apply to Polandball offer every creator a good basis for developing a funny story, yet offering very few restrictions.
If you have to do something, write me a funny AIDS play. Sure you can. It's the biggest joke played on us since sex itself - and with the longest punch line.
We live in a funny time. If you don’t go corporate, you can’t compete. You’re relegated as irrelevant. People used to admire that. There used to be something badassed and poetic about it.
I was asking the school shrink, 'Has anyone ever told you the top of your head looks like a penis?' I thought that was a really funny thing to tell a bald shrink.
[The Leesburg Garden Club is a] nest of Soviet fellow travelers clacking busybodies in a Soviet jellyfish front, sitting here in Leesburg oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves.
The panic over public health care is funny and sad, since America has had death panels and sinister bureaucrats for years. They're called Aetna, Humana, and Wellpoint, they make a killing, figuratively and literally.
It's nothing really. It's the unique presentation that makes me look good in the action scenes. Why did I dare do them? That's a funny question! Why do I act? Why do I breathe!
It was funny. I knew I didn't want the bomb to be a success. But yet I'd spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn't stand not to do it right.
A wonderfully funny letter was sent to me signed by a fraternity in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., medical school; the fraternity for doctors had voted me the body on which they would most like to operate.
Hullo! What's this? What are these funny brown-and-olive landscapes doing in an impressionist exhibition? Brown! I ask you? Isn't it absurd for a man to go on using brown and call himself an impressionist painter?
Frank Rutter
• Rutter, Frank. Art in My Time, p. 111. Rich & Cowan, London, 1933.
• Rutter satirising the reaction of fans of impressionist art on seeing Cézanne's work in London in 1905.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Frank Rutter" (Sourced)
He must have been a gardener that cared a lot,
Who weeded out the tears and grew a good crop;
But now it all looks strange, it's funny how one insect
Can damage so much grain.
He impressed me mainly as belonging to the type of 'the University Man': a certain externalism of polite propriety, verging towards the conventional. I do not think in my presence he said anything 'funny' or quaint.
He must have been a gardener that cared a lot Who weeded out the tears and grew a good crop. But now it all looks strange, it's funny how one insect Can damage so much grain.
I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism.
It's flattering being compared to Will Smith because he's successful and brilliant at what he does and he's a nice and funny guy. But at the end of the day, I want to be known as Richard Blackwood.
Andy: It's funny. On the outside, I was an honest man. Straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook. Red: In prison, a man'll do most anything to keep his mind occupied.
It's funny – if you told me five years ago that Netflix was producing quality content and they have actors and filmmakers all over Hollywood super excited to be in business with them, I would've been like, what?
Life, like art, is purposeless and unpredictable. That’s what makes it beautiful and rare! In life, we are given the choice between three paths: utopia, illusion or nonsense. The funny thing is, none of us get the joke…
Rich deposits of perversity crop up in his humor - and his sudden attacks of virtue or sentimentality midway through his own or other persons' jests hint that his imp has suggested to him something particularly unfunny and unpardonable.
"Just go and feed yourselves on a wide array of products containing high-fructose corn sugar. Zheesh." "That wasn't funny, Evil Mark. It sounded fake and hollow. You're terrible at being ironic, and you've been rehearsing that line, haven't you?"
Funny. It used to be I couldn't wait to go. And now that the time to leave is here, I only want to stay. Why can't I be happy- or at least, why can't I make up my mind?
Maybe baby I'll have you, Maybe baby you'll be true. Maybe baby I'll have you for me. (All for me)It's funny honey you don't care-a-are, You never listen to my prayer-a-yer, Maybe baby you will love me someday (someday).
The Middleman: But I've always been fascinated by the ability of preassembled sets of submasculine archetypes to tug at the heartstrings of a 12-to-17-year-old fanbase.
Wendy: Funny, I've always been fascinated by their ability to bring up my lunch.
Interviewer: Have you ever attended a mime school? Brian: Nop. Never. I used to watch a lot of cartoons and the Muppets Show and that's why I make the funny faces. So it was all cartoon and Jim Henson.
Over seven thousand US veterans die of suicide every year, which is funny... [false laughter]... because you'd think they'd die over there, but they come home! Right? I thought that must be funny, because nobody was taking it that seriously.
Don Wilson: I don't think you know how much it means to me to do the commercial. After all I'm not a funny man. I can't sing or dance. I don't lead a band. What are you paying me for?
Jake: That part's so funny. It's really funny. Go back, play it one more time. The look on your face is priceless. Just watch that one part. That part's so funny. Just rewind it. Just watch that one part again.
So where are the strong
And who are the trusted?

And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony —
'cause each time I feel it slippin away, it just makes me wanna cry:
What's so funny 'bout Peace, Love, and Understanding?
And we'll be right back after these messages, fellas grab ya nuttsacks chicks squeeze your breastsess, we ain't all that grown it's still funny like goin to the store with your own rainbow money, since that had an insane flow sonny
I have seen the very bottom of life: I was so afraid I wouldn’t be funny anymore. I just knew that I would lose my zaniness and my sense of humor. But I didn’t. Recovery turned out to be a wonderful thing.
When I send up the verkramptes, I am always sending up the verkrampte ghosts in me. But I never poke fun at people - it's their ATTITUDES that I find funny. Some of them seem to have their scripts all mixed up.
I can embarrass myself very easily on guitar. It's funny because people say to me I can play anything; I'm God on the guitar. But I could make a big list of everything I can't play... I'm grateful that people don't notice that.
Interesting. An unconvincing word; avoid it as a means of introduction. Instead of announcing that what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so... Also to be avoided in introduction is the word funny. Nothing becomes funny by being labeled so.
I try not to take my life for granted. I have friends who have tendinitis. That would kill me. A short break from the violin is fine, but if I don't touch it for three or four days, my fingers start to feel funny.
It's crazy because people expect you to be funny all the time and every day is not a funny day. I go to funerals and people are like "Tell a joke" and "Say one of your lines in a movie." IT'S A FUNERAL, MAN!
We thought being offered the M.B.E. [Member of the Order of the British Empire] was as funny as everybody else thought it was. Why? What for? We didn't believe it. It was a part we didn't want. We all met and agreed it was daft.
Humour very often consists of shrewd perceptions about people. It's usually fun at someone's expense. Nowadays if you're funny at anybody's expense they run to the UN and say, "I must have an ombudsman to protect me." You hardly dare have a shrewd perception about anybody.
It so coincided that Marcos had money. After the Bretton Woods agreement he started buying gold from Fort Knox. Three thousand tons, then 4,000 tons. I have documents for these: 7,000 tons. Marcos was so smart. He had it all. It's funny; America didn't understand him.
I purchased a Chevrolet Impala. I shopped around and had 5 different auto dealers competing for my business. Because all 5 offered the same product, they were forced to compete for my business... Funny thing, they still made a fair profit — not an outrageous one.
It is indeed funny to hear people criticize Lord Rama for giving up his beloved consort princess Sita. They know that by no means are they going to get any satisfactory answer on that question but still this type of criticism of mythology lingers on ...
The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn't think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn't the same as murder, it was a fair fight.
Life is funny. Life isn't categorized into comedy, drama, action, is it?So I don't know why they try to categorize everything. It drives me crazy-why it would have to be just a romantic comedy or... I want to have a little integrity, a little story, you know?
I haf von funny leedle poy Vot comes schust to mine knee; Der queerest schap, der createst rogue, As ever you dit see. He runs und schumps and schmashes dings In all barts off der house: But vot off dot? He vas mine son, Mine leedle Yawcob Strauss.
We'd seen all the rushes, which we thought very funny, but the premiere audience reaction was cold and so were the reviews. However, the moment it was released it made audiences everywhere laugh like anything, and it showed that our original reaction had been right. What a relief!
Movie Movie - " What keeps a viewer happy throughout is the performing gang; even the old-timers seem to be on their toes, responding to the fresh talent...Movie Movie is friendly and funny and enjoyable, but it also gives you a sense of the timidity of moviemaking now..."
Postal is a politically incorrect movie, and also a politically incorrect game. I think if you have a game where you can use a cat as a silencer, you cannot make this as a serious movie. So it must be a funny movie. It should be an absurd comedy.
I think the Cold War works as a great analogy or simile for different kinds of conflict. It's funny, when you look back at it, it's one of the last times that the boundaries were clear. Now, as we see on 'Homeland,' there are no clear boundaries and enemies.
I fell into conversation with Douglas. His is a split personality. À deux he is delightful; clever, funny, observant, drily cynical. But get him anywhere near "display mode", particularly if there are officials around, and he might as well have a corncob up his arse. Pompous, trite, high-sounding, cautiously guarded.
So the president is like, "Well, once upon a time it was Congress's job to decide whether or not we attacked countries, so let's let them decide." Which is funny, because, as we all know, if Congress were on fire, Congress could not pass the "Pour Water on Congress Act".
Fun with Dick and Jane - " a nitwit comedy on the order of For Pete's Sake, though its much worse made...Ted Kotcheff is the kind of director who thinks ugliness is funny. He really should be locked up for what he does to the performers...everything about it feels cheap."
Valentino - " Nureyev doesn't evoke Valentino, but from time to time he has a captivating, very funny temperament of his own...There is no artistry left in Ken Russell's work..His films have become..a mixture of offensiveness and crude dumbness - and that is about the only attraction they may have."
His viciousness and his cruelty to staff was unlike anything that I had ever experienced in my life … He just loved to degrade the staff. He got a kick out of it. He thought it was funny. Anybody who didn't think it was funny, like I didn't, was very suspect.
The funny thing about Klaus Kinski is that for all the bravado he’s just a scared little man. All you have to do is stand up to him. Herzog knew and I knew that, too. He wasn’t a bad person, he’s just so self-centered. Everything was his way or the highway.
Show me your little poem and I'll tell you why it wasn't written any earlier or later than it was.Oh no, you've got me wrong. Keep your funny piece of paper with its scribbles. All I need for my ends is your layer of dirt and the long gone smell of burning.
As I walk through
This wicked world
Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity,
I ask myself
Is all hope lost?

Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?

And each time I feel like this inside,
Theres one thing I wanna know:
What's so funny 'bout Peace, Love, and Understanding?

The general opinion appears to be that it is very funny to make yourself out as fast or as foolish as possible; though even worse than this is the painful orthodoxy of those individuals who claim Shakespeare for their favourite poet, Beethoven for their favourite composer, and Raphael for their favourite painter.
Dwellers in huts and in marble halls— From Shepherdess up to Queen— Cared little for bonnets, and less for shawls, And nothing for crinoline. But now simplicity's not the rage, And it's funny to think how cold The dress they wore in the Golden Age Would seem in the Age of Gold.
Clothing
• Henry S. Leigh, The Two Ages, Stanza 4.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Clothing" (Quotes, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 31-33.)
Stewart: You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.
Carlson: You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think.
Stewart: You need to go to one. [...]
Carlson: Wait. I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny.
Stewart: No. No. I'm not going to be your monkey.
Now this is very funny because my brother's name is Michael Chang, I go in for interviews or just talk to people and they say, "so what does your brother do?" I say he plays tennis and they automatically assume that he is Michael Chang, the tennis player, and I don't say anything.
Jennifer was great. She is fantastic. Really easy to work with, no drama, really down-to-earth, such a funny girl. Nothing but good things to say about her. She really was great to work with. And it always makes it easier when you’re working with people that you like and you enjoy being around.
It's funny how your relationship with your own looks changes when you go weeks without seeing yourself. None of us really knows what we look like after all. In that nanosecond it takes for a mirror to give our faces back to us our mind has already done all sorts of perverse rearranging.
This is a funny question: we all know what it means to dosomething. But the problem is, if the act wasn't determined in advance, by your desires, beliefs, and personality, among other things, it seems to be something that just happened, without any explanation. And in that case, how was it your doing?
Uh oh. I don't think that I can tell who it [the person "Mr. James Dean" references] is, but it was definitely an experience that I went through that was interesting and I learned a lot from that time in my life. I think the song is very funny when I think about it.
It was a fun show. At one point the barricade in front of the stage gave way, which scared the concert promoters because they thought people were going to get hurt. So we had to stop the show for a while. That was funny... Although I guess only funny because no one got hurt.
It would have been funny if I had been an observer and not a participant, an idea that gave me a disconcerting insight into gossip. As I walked beside the silent Tamara, I realized that despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt.
This is a funny question: we all know what it means to do something. But the problem is, if the act wasn't determined in advance, by your desires, beliefs, and personality, among other things, it seems to be something that just happened, without any explanation. And in that case, how was it your doing?
Determinism
• Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (1987), Ch. 6. Free Will
• Source: Wikiquote: "Determinism" (Quotes)
Darkseid: I'm more powerful than I've ever been, and the last time we met, you barely managed to hold your own.
Superman: Funny. That's not how I remember it.
Darkseid: Allow me to refresh your memory. [Darkseid picks up the Daily Planet globe and uses it to slam Superman through every floor of the building]
You know what so funny, this strike has been going on for a long time. It's lasted longer than the Civil Rights movement, what the hell is this? It's painfully obvious to me white people don't know how to protest. You need like an Al Sharpton, have a dream, go to the mountaintop, do something!
I was learning that, even for a woman with power, the path was dotted with land mines—she's so ambitious. she's so aggressive. she's ruthless. "Funny thing," I used to say, "a man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless . . . all a woman has to do is put you on hold."
In the early part of the 20th century, there was a fantasy writer named James Branch Cabell who had a theory of writing as magic. His books (highly recommended, especially Jurgen) are both funny and mythological … and it's easy to see how his process of creating characters was really a process of evocation and invocation.
He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.
He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a funny t'ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless — so much less cold than the Professional Optimists.
~ Gottlieb, Ch. 26
I know some people say I can be funny. But there is always a deeper meaning to what I say. I am a socialist at heart and have the interests of the poor in mind. When people see how I manage to work my way out of tough situations, it gives them hope in their own life
The life, no matter how traumatic, never explains the work, if the work is any good. W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Doris Lessing, and Saul Bellow variously believed in faeries, funny money, flying saucers, and orgone energy accumulation, but so have millions of other people who never got around to writing even a mediocre poem or novel.
What I fell in love with as a child was 'My Fair Lady,' 'Funny Face,' 'American in Paris,' and 'Singin' in the Rain.' Just perfect movies to me and I was dancing. I started ballet when I was three. And I fell in love with those movies and fell in love with Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron.
I had to develop a sense of humor I'm sure it's a defense mechanism. It was, 'Before they make fun of me, I'll make a joke.' Being funny is just a point of view about life in general. Sometimes it's born out of difficult childhoods, where you have to develop a sense of humor. Ultimately, it's a gift.
My thought is always, ‘It’s only downhill from here’. That’s how I’ve always operated, ever since I began Family Guy. I had the crippling fear that I used up all the funny last week. That crippling insecurity really drives you to do your best. Your moments of pure joy are few and far between, but they do exist.
Meanwhile back at mama's. The porch light's on, come in if you wanna. Supper's on the stove and beer's in the fridge. Red sun sinkin' out low on the ridge. Games on the tube and daddy smokes cigarettes. Whiskey keeps his whistle wet. Funny the things you thought you'd never miss. In a world gone crazy as this.
“Why are we drinking Zima? It’s beyond irony. It’s not funny or anything. It’s just gross. Why not just serve us jugs of Hitler’s piss instead?” “Drinking Zima is something Douglas Coupland would make a character do.” “To what end?” “It’d be a device that would allow him to locate the characters in time and a specific sort of culture.”
Life-affirming people are a bit creepy and self-consciously life-affirming art is usually awful. My books tend to have happy endings, or at least that’s one way of reading them. My characters are exuberant and funny as well as dark. Duality is the essence of my voice so it’s appropriate for me to have an evil twin to blame things on.
In fact the only times we could read funny books was when my father was in the Navy. Nothing would infuriate him more than to catch us browsing through Captain Marvel or Plastic Man. Men, after all, didn’t waste their time reading funny books. Men, he’d tell us, took life seriously. Nothing could be learned from books that were funny.
I never really had them. I always get the eccentric kids who dress funny and sit and write poetry for three months in their bedrooms... ...I was going to see tons of shows when I was a teenager, so if I was a girl, would that have made me a groupie? If I wanted to shake Thurston Moore's hand or something?
The first thing I did when I picked up any instrument, when I was five years old, was write a song. It's kind of funny; I thought about it, statements that it's a "solo effort" — it's kind of like, "Oh, well I've been doing this since I was five." I was kind of doing this before I did anything else.
It's so funny that people think I actually ran for President. I am maybe the most un-political person you're ever going to meet. When I put "Elected" out, it was definitely a satire ... "Alice Cooper for President" ... when everybody realized I was running against Nixon, you known, even on a joke level, I think I got a lot of write-in votes.
It's the bane of existence for anyone in comedy. 'The photograph must be funny!' So the people coordinating the shoot throw rubber chickens at you, 20 at a time. Or put a feathered hat on you. Or give you a clown nose. Of course, all of this makes you depressed, so you wind up looking more like you're promoting A Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Sometimes people associate getting big with selling out, which is funny because that's not something you necessarily have choice in.  That's not a matter that is entirely up to you and at the same time, who hasn't sold out?  If you've heard of a specific artist, they're big enough--they got to you.  Where do you draw the line between what's big and what's too big?
Calvin and Hobbes comics contain examples of many different types of humor. Some comic strips may be funny to you but not to your friend. The strips that make you laugh may not even crack a smile from someone else. Many times, we get frustrated and say, "Don't you get it?!" Remember, different people have varying ideas of what is beautiful, ugly, boring, exciting, or interesting.
It's funny how we imagine that lifelong relationships have to be build on a mountain top of moments, so huge they're written across the sky in letters a mile wide. But I knew a skywriter once and he told me the letters are just strategically placed puffs of smoke that are easily blown away. In reality, a life together is made of the simplest, smallest things.
Of obvious appeal to the humourless is the writer who comes on stage in a clown outfit or King Kong suit, with party hat and harem slippers, with banana skins and custard pies... It remains a sound rule that funny journalism can only flourish as the offshoot or sideline of something larger. No funny journalist who is that and nothing more will ever write anything lastingly funny.
I'm on the Internet a lot more than I watch TV and most everybody I know is, and yet if you watch most late-night talk shows, it's as if it doesn't even exist. So the Internet, it's just something I wanted to make use of in some way. I was fascinated by what appeared to be a child singing this song. It just struck me as funny.
Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.
'What's funny?' said Pin, shifting uncomfortably in the hospital bed. 'I was looking at your mouth. It's exactly the same as mine.' 'Small and mean,' said Pin, whose devotion to the church did not damp her vulgar sense of humour. 'Wanna see a cat's bum?' She pursed her lips into a tight bunch. They snickered in the quiet ward. 'You'll never go to heaven,' said Kathleen. 'You're rude.'
There's a crisis of ideas in art, which is felt by many, many people. Not only in art: in social thinking, in politics. That's one of the other things about this poll, one of the attempts to get out of this, by some maybe funny means — humor helps — because we really don't know where to go. and what our next step has to be. Artists now.
Marie: Something funny might be nice. But not something necessarily big, hahaha, laugh out loud funny, and certainly not-make-fun-of-other-people funny, but certainly something human funny. And uh, if it could um, sneak up on you, surprise you, and at the same time make you think that what you thought was only right in a wrong kind of way, and when you're wrong, there's a certain rightness to your wrongness.
Wrongs
• Peter Hedges, Dan in Real Life (2007).
Metatron: Somebody's clued them in to a loophole in Catholic dogma that would allow them to reenter Heaven.
Bethany: So what? They beat the system. Good for them.
Metatron: It's not that simple. If they get in, they will have reversed God's decree. Now listen up because this part is very important: existence in all it's form and splendor functions solely on one principle: God is infallible. To prove God wrong would undo reality and everything that is. Up would become down, black would become white, existence would become nothingness. In essence - if they are allowed to enter that church, they'll unmake the world.
Dogma (film) written by Kevin Smith.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Wrongs" (Sourced)
Up in Smoke - "which stars Cheech and Chong, is an exploitation slapstick comedy, like The Groove Tube; this piece of stoned-hippie foolishness is also crudely done but is more consistently funny...Up in Smoke gives us the sunny side of the drug culture..Giggly, happy insanity is always the goal..And Cheech and Chong are so gracefully dumb-assed that if you're in a relaxed mood you can't help laughing at them."
To the realpolitik cynics who say Islamist theocracy is a reality we have to live with, I respond: funny – they never said they can live with YOU! To those who say the theocrats can reform if we are nice to them, I say you do not know the difference between Islamist revolution and secular ones. Those who believe they speak with the absolute authority of Allah demand absolute submission.
Clinton has changed all that. By endowing bin Laden with his new title (i. e. America's Public Enemy Number One), he has given the Saudi dissident what he sought: recognition as the greatest enemy of Western "corruption," the leader of all resistance against US policy in the Middle East. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic, the way America now treats its opponents as if they were Hollywood bandits.
I think it's quite enough to simply be sarcastic about something. I like to do that quite a lot, and it's one of my favorite things to look at. That's why I think there's a thin line between melodrama and satire, and I like to dance across that line sometimes. I like the story to take a very funny turn or have a character who is much more of a cartoon.
I can't call them linear narratives, and I can't call them chronological in a traditional, classical sense; I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I borrow more from William Faulkner than William Shakespeare. I just find it funny that at this point, we see a collection of highly charged, highly potent symbols as referring back to a classical aesthetic, because to me they seem deeply connected to the pedestrian actuality of real life.
What used to be called a Canadian novel was a kind of prairie frontier story, but it was phony. In the plot, people came to the land; the land loved them; they worked and struggled and had lots of children. There was a Frenchman who talked funny and a greenhorn from England who was a fancy-pants but when it came to the crunch he was all courage. Those novels would make you retch.
Yes, I've been compared to Jackie Gleason often. I've been often compared to Lou Costello. … But after a while you start to go, 'Well, geez. Do I have a personality in there?' The funny thing about Gleason is, he always used to talk about watching Jack Oakie. And if you ever watch Jack Oakie in an old movie, it's very similar to Gleason. … I think we all steal from one another.
What's funny, if you look at the video of the National Guard and police, it's very difficult to tell the difference between who's who—who's the soldier tasked with serving and protecting for American security, who's the civilian police officer paid by taxpayers to protect, first and foremost, the citizen? And that, in itself, speaks volumes: when you can't tell the difference between the soldier versus the police officer on the scene—we have a problem.
Police state
• Cheryl K. Chumley, interviewed by John Stossel on Stossel (21 August 2014), 9:13 PM ET.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Police state" (Quotes, C)
if a girl likes me a lot and starts getting real nervous and suddenly begins asking me funny questions and looks sad if I give the wrong answers and she says things like, "Do you think it's going to rain?" and I say, "It beats me," and she says, "Oh," and looks a little sad at the clear blue California sky, I think: Thank God, it's you, baby, this time   Instead of me.
I never give my work to somebody else and say, "What do you think about that?" I just don't trust anybody. If I think it's funny, or if I think it's silly, I send it in anyway because I'm just trying to please myself. I never try to please a certain audience. I think that's disastrous. There's no way in the world you can anticipate what your reader is going to like or dislike.
[P.O.V. shot from a camcorder, as Roger goes down a water slide.]
Roger: Whoo-hoo! Yee-haw! (aims at Andy) Hey, honey, smile!
Andy: (dropping her soda) Roger, you moron! That camera isn't waterproof!
Roger: (sees the splashdown pool approaching) Uh-oh...
[Brief underwater shot from the camera, replaced quickly by grainy static. Cut to Jason, Marcus and Quincy watching this in the living room.]
Marcus: Your dad takes some pretty funny home videos.
Jason: (glumly) Took.
Conversation Piece - " Visconti, not fully recovered from a stroke..directed Conversation Piece from a wheelchair part of the time. Although it takes place entirely in the interior of a Roman house, one doesn't feel confined...Mangano's Countess..Shes gorgeous, but with the reptilian glitter of an aging swinger...so venemous, arrogant and tantrummy she's funny...Visconti is an eccentric master who has earned the right to his follies, when he can make them as pleasurable as Conversation Piece..."
I don't mind people putting us down, because if everybody really liked us, it would be a bore. You've got to have people putting you down. It doesn't give any edge to it if everybody just falls flat on their face saying, "You're great." We enjoy some of the criticisms as well, they're quite funny; some of the clever criticisms, not the ones that don't know anything, but some of the clever ones are quite fun.
If you're hell-bent on making your bank look and sound like a simpleton, a desk labelled Travel Money is still a bit too formal. Why not call it Oooh! Look at the Funny Foreign Banknotes instead? And accompany it with a doodle of a French onion-seller riding a bike, with a little black beret on his head and a baguette up his arse and a speech bubble saying, "Zut Alors! Here is where you gettez les Francs!"
Sergeant Bill Mauldin seemed to us over there to be the finest cartoonist the war had produced. And that's not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are also terribly grim and real. Mauldin's cartoons aren't about training-camp life, which is most familiar to people at home. They are about the men in the line — the tiny percentage of our vast Army who are actually doing the dying. His cartoons are about the war.
It's funny. People come to my house because I was recommended to them to do some writing. They've never heard of me, and you can see the reticence written all over their faces. Then they look at the walls and see the platinum and gold albums and they say, "Oh. That one's from Prince! That's from Robert Palmer! Oh my God, Paul McCartney!" And then they say, "You're a really fine composer"--without having heard any of my music.
I respect her talent and her brain and who she is as a person — and that kind of admiration and respect is a big factor in binding someone in a relationship. I know what a good heart she has, and how empathetic she is with all kinds of people and issues — she's so brilliant on top of it that she can voice these things. And she's as funny as she can possibly be. She makes me laugh.
We are clandestine because we refuse the spectacle of celebrity and we are everyone. Because without real names, faces or noses, we show that our words, dreams, and desires are more important than our biographies. Because we reject the society of surveillance that watches, controls, spies upon, records and checks our every move. Because by hiding our identity we recover the power of our acts. Because with greasepaint we give resistance a funny face and become visible once again.
I see people who write characters who are loonies and make them convincing and believable, and I envy them tremendously. I don’t really understand them. It’s funny, because I’ve created my own monster. In the ‘Great War’ and ‘American Empire’ books, I’m writing the person who is the functional equivalent of Adolf Hitler. I’m inside his head — and that’s a very strange place for somebody who thinks of himself as a fairly rational fellow to be. That’s alarming
It's so funny being a Christian musician. It always scares me when people think so highly of Christian music, Contemporary Christian music especially. Because I kinda go, I know a lot of us, and we don't know jack about anything. Not that I don't want you to buy our records and come to our concerts. I sure do. But you should come for entertainment. If you really want spiritual nourishment, you should go to church...you should read the Scriptures.
It’s funny to read articles about Gordon Gekko as if he exists…. If you really listen to Gekko’s speech, half of it makes sense…. But it’s the excess, losing moderation, that destroys all…. There is nothing inherently wrong with greed as a human motivator, greed motivating evolution…. But there’s a huge disconnect between the classes. It is very demoralizing to work for someone who makes a billion dollars a year while you make just barely enough to make it.
But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some heroic, some villainous, some true, some false, some funny, some tragic, and all of them combining to form the mystical, undefinable entity we call the school. Not exactly the building, not exactly the faculty or the students or the alumni — more than all those things but also less, a paradox, an order, a mystery, a monster, an utter joy.
Ricky Martin: "Why did the chicken cross the road?"
Andrew Martin: One does not know, sir; possibly a predator was behind the chicken, or possibly there was a female chicken on the other of the road, if it's a male chicken; possibly a food source, or depending on the season it might be migrating; one hopes there's no traffic.
Ricky Martin: "To get to the other side."
Andrew Martin: "To get to the other side."  Ah,…why is that funny?
Agatha Clay: (thinking) Right. So the castle's a huge mechanical death trap. But, theoretically, it's my huge mechanical death trap, so it probably won't kill me...at least, not until I've repaired it...unless I run afoul of one of the damaged bits...or it doesn't recognize me as part of the Heterodyne family...or it decides it would be funny to kill me anyway...and then there's all the convicts on repair duty with me...and an imposter who'll probably kill me on sight. (sighs) Great.
I don't understand it completely … but she adores me. She thinks I'm funny. … My attitude towards communication has always been: it's a slippery slope, because you start communicating, the next thing you know you're going to be talking to each other, the next thing you know you're going to be feeling things, and then you'll be living your life and I want no part of that. … So I tried to avoid that stuff, but she forces it upon me.
I was at a dinner party at Steve Martin's house not too long ago. Some very funny people were there - Steve, Marty Short, the whole gang. We sat around the table, like eight of us, and we laughed so hard that we were just sitting there laughing and crying. And I thought, 'This is great. This is what it's like when life is really good. Sitting around with people of that quality and that caliber, people being funny. Smart and funny.' It's great.
Martin Amis's reputation as the bad boy of British writing shouldn't overpower the fact that he's simply a fantastic writer. His brash, intelligent novels are sharp with insight, and his wordplay makes reading Amis feel like playing: swinging high in a swing, hanging from monkey bars, just having fun. Yet his view of the world is not a light one... authors across the "pond" often hone a super-realism that is actually bleak. Amis's hyperbole makes his works funny, but they're funny with an edge.
It's so funny because when you do smoke weed and write a song, you're like, 'Yeah, this is brilliant, this is excellent!' - and the next morning you go back and often find that really it's not very good at all... I've never done anything like acid or cocaine and I hope I don't. But I guess you have to try things once in a while... just once. I think you have to be very wary of falling into that trap of getting addicted.
Les Valseuses - " When Les Valseuses was released here, in 1974, it was variously described as sordid, loathsome, and disgusting...What is the picture's crime? Probably that viewers find themselves laughing at things that shock them...Going Places is an explosively funny erotic farce - both a celebration and a satire of men's daydreams - and some people find its gusto revolting in much the same way that the bursting comic force of the sexual hyperbole in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was thought revolting."
Roberto Clemente, to me, was a compassionate man. He was a man of two faces. In the clubhouse, he was the center of all the funny stories. He’d hold court in front of his locker and there was always gaiety and laughter. When the time came for the game, Roberto would put on his other face – the disturbed face he always wore when he was concentrating completely on winning a baseball game. That’s why I say the fans never knew the real Roberto Clemente.
I think more audiences would like contemporary music if they were presented with it, told about it. It's just a matter of familiarity, I think. Then one begins to look back at old music as stuffy, or even tiresome. It's funny -- I'm beginning to like older music more than I used to, but it's like I'm going into a museum and contemplating a Rembrandt. It just feels like its part of the aristocratic class system of kings and queens and dukes which just doesn't exist anymore.
(speaking in a solemn tone to a group of young school children) Now you know that your headmistress, Miss Davis, was going to come in here and just check that you were all going to be well behaved. She can’t do that because, as many of you probably know, she can’t be here today, er, because her pants fell down earlier on. It’s not funny. If any of you see her, don’t make a fuss because it’s a bit embarrassing for her, OK? Alright? It’s not funny.
Funny thing about those Middle Ages,” said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they’re in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there’s an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can’t deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.”
My having been in the LSE made me suspect in the eyes of the Right but funnily enough it did not help me with the Left either. After getting a seat, and a pretty unsafe one at that, my campaign started, my opposite number from the Left said in his speeches that I was an Anglicised sahib who knew nothing of Kerala, did not eat Malayali food and did not even know how to wear a mundu [dhoti]! So there were problems for me on both sides.
Huey:: Mr. Jones, it's Huey. You ready?
James Earl Jones::Young man, I told you last time this isn't funny. You're going to get us both in trouble.
Huey:: Last time, I promise. Hold on. [Opens a three-way call]
George W. Bush:: [Answers the phone] This is Bush.
Huey:: Mr. President, please hold for Darth Vader.
James Earl Jones:: [In full Vader voice] President Bush, this is Darth Vader... I wanted to thank you for helping spread Evil throughout the galaxy!
George W. Bush:: Uh... Thank you, Lord Vader!
Calvin: Look at how people are portrayed in the comic strips. The women are indecisive whiners, nagging shrews, and bimbos! And the men are no better. They're befuddled morons, heavy drinkers, gluttons, and lazy goof-offs! Everyone is incompetent, unappreciated, and unsuccessful! What kind of insidious social programming is this?? No wonder the world's such a mess! I demand politically correct, morally uplifting role models in the funnies!
Calvin's Dad: Yes, we all know how funny good role models are.
Calvin: And look, all the kids are obnoxious brats!
  p.158
We were live on-air and I had to fill for time, so I just rolled up on him — I didn't know him. And I remember thinking how unfazed he was that we'd just shoved a camera in his face, because he was kind, he was charismatic, he was funny. He was a good guy and I remember that meeting very well. We spoke after that, and we would see each other out a lot and I would go and see him play. He was always cool, like effortlessly cool.
My favourite memories involve the actual process of writing sketches - just a few guys lounging around in a room talking nonsense, until suddenly an idea would start to coalesce, and you'd start nudging it toward fruition. I've never laughed so much before or since. Also, there were those very, very few nights where you'd be on a stage and some strange contract developed between performers and audience, and everything you did was funny. That was magical - and a direct visceral experience that you never really get from writing prose.
I saw a review of our new album, and it said, "Every single component of the White Stripes is a gigantic lie." What does that mean? Have I sat down and said I was born in Mississippi? No. Did I say I grew up on a plantation and learned how to play guitar from a blind man? I never said anything like that. It's funny that people think me and Meg sit up late at night, in front of a gas lamp, and come up with these intricate lies to trick people.
But once I had a Jabscreen of my own, I soon discovered the novelty lasts six months, tops. There's a limit to how many conversations you can have about it before you reach burnout. Have you seen the app which takes your photo and makes it look like you're really fat? Yes. And the game where you land all the planes on the runway? Yes, that too. Hey, how about this thing with the funny red monster that repeats everything you say? Please leave me. Please just leave me here to die.
I believe it's the end of the world. What? Harrogate was looking at the pavement. He said it again. Look at me, Suttree said. He looked up. Sad pinched face, streaked with grime. Are you serious? Well what do you think about it? Suttree laughed. It aint funny, said Harrogate. You're funny, you squirrely son of a bitch. Do you think the world will end just because you're cold? It aint just me. It's cold all over. It's not cold by Rufus's stove. Now get your ass up there. I'll see you later.
At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don’t really think of myself as "writing humor." I’m simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious. Here’s the thing. Most of what we witness in life is too complex to take in whole. Because of this we unconsciously edit what we see, select what to really record and what to ignore, which is why people who look at the same thing don’t necessarily see the same thing...Comic writers don’t so much invent funny things as strip away the distractions, the impediments to laughter.
High Anxiety - " Mel Brooks grabs us by the lapels and screams into our faces, 'Laugh! It's funny!' The open secret of his comedy is that his material isn't necessarily funny - it's being grabbed by the lapels that makes us laugh. (It's being grabbed by the lapels that makes us stop laughing, too.)...High Anxiety is dedicated to Hitchcock as the master of suspense and it doesn't have a whisper of suspense. It doesn't operate on any level except that of bumbling slapstick farce, where most of the custard pies miss their targets."
James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem: "Yeah, I did [meet her at South by Southwest], she was incredibly sweet and really nice. It was really funny: She played, and I don't know what it sounded like 'cause I was on the side of the stage which just sounds like chaos because you don't hear what the PA's doing. She came off and I introduced myself, "Hi, I'm James, I hear we're doing a buncha shows together," and she said, "Really? You still wanna do shows after that shitty show?" Which I thought was great." May 2005
Chico Fernandez, Roberto and myself, the three of us palled around. We went out to eat, we went to the movies together, we laughed and we joked. Oh yeah, he was funny. The three of us, we just laughed all the time. See, we joked amongst ourselves. Some people think because you’re colored, they’ve got the stereotype that we’re like those guys in the old days – always cracking jokes. I’m not a joke cracker. Clemente wasn’t either, but we could say things now and then that were funny and we could ad lib things.
He has only just learned to tell dreams from waking;
only just realized that he is he;
only just whittled with his hand né fin
a flint, a rocket ship;
easily drowned in the ocean's teaspoon,
not even funny enough to tickle the void:
sees only with his eyes;
hears only with his ears;
his speech's personal best is the conditional;
he uses his reason to pick holes in reason.
In short, he's next to to one,
but his head's full of freedom, omniscience and the Being
beyond his foolish meat —
did you ever!
 Lisa: (after reading "C:DOSRUN" joke) Ha, only one person in a million would find that funny!  Professor John Frink: Yes, we call that the "Dennis Miller Ratio." (The Simpsons, Season 10, Episode 22, They Saved Lisa's Brain. See The Dennis Miller Ratio for additional information.) In another episode of The Simpsons, the Simpson family upgraded the house to a fully automated, computer-controlled system:  Dennis Miller-like voice: "Hey, cha-cha, this house has got more features than a NASA relief map of Turkmenistan."  Lisa: "Isn't that the voice that caused all those suicides?"  Marge: "Murder-suicides." (From CABF19, Treehouse of Horror XII).
Are we making more mistakes now? I don't think so. Science is a high-risk activity. And when you do science—this is very important incidentally for the general public, and for policy makers—if you are not wasting some of your money, you are not doing good science. It's a funny way to say this. You've got to back high-risk opportunities. And high-risk opportunities means some fraction of them are going to fail. And I think in any science funding scenario, you've got to say, 10, 20, maybe even 30% of your funds are going to be invested in failures.
Most societies are ruled by mediocre people that have no vision and no imagination. Most rulers are scared of creation and creative people. Artists are funny people. All they want is to touch and move, challenge and surprise others. But dictators hate surprises more than anything else. All they want is to turn their territory into a neat little toy prison camp and play with their little toy people. Push them around, rip a leg or a head off now and then or throw them into the garbage when they are tired of their stupid, little doll faces.
He was pretty. His eyes were kind and young. One had to wonder whether he was fourteen years old, or a thousand, being so smooth and untouched. A little boy peered out of the man's face. He was funny... I was bewildered... a man, responsible for the life and death of thousands, and yet there was no trace on him? One could be frightened of less, and yet so harmlessly innocent? Yes, innocent was the word... I knew I would remember this meeting the rest of my life, because I had never before met an emptyness like this.
Calvin: Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor? When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny. Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?
Hobbes: I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.
Calvin: (after a long pause) I can't tell if that's funny or really scary.
  p64 (19 Apr 92)
If we are all insane, then all insanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (except neither of those two amateur-night surgeons were ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you're under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your business...although it's doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Even after my old man returned from the wars with all his ribbons and a thousand stories I still struggled for survival without my love. He was so busy rigging up the house to look like a ship, printing the rules of command on little notes which he pinned to the wall above the sink, Attention: Do not waste water … Do not throw garbage in here; in the outhouse and in the washroom, Attention: Toilet paper rules … Use only four sections per use … Do not throw funny paper in commode. I doubt if he noticed my dying condition.
We spent Friday evening with our friends at the boarding-house, and our curiosity was gratified by the sight of their fellow-inmates, Mrs. Drew and Miss Hook, Mr. Wynne and Mr. Fitzhugh; the latter is brother to Mrs. Lance, and very much the gentleman. He has lived in that house more than twenty years, and poor man, is so totally deaf that they say he could not hear a cannon, were it fired close to him; having no cannon at hand to make the experiment, I took it for granted, and talked to him a little with my fingers, which was funny enough.
Since the decay of the belief in personal immortality, death has never seemed funny, and it will be a long time before it does so again. Hence the disappearance of the facetious epitaph, once a common feature of country churchyards. I should be astonished to see a comic epitaph dated later than 1850. There is one in Kew, if I remember rightly, which might be about that date. About half the tombstone is covered with a long panegyric on his dead wife by a bereaved husband: at the bottom of the stone is a later inscription which reads, ‘Now he’s gone, too’.'
Sour Grapes is a comedy about things that aren't funny. It reminded me of Crash, an erotic thriller about things no one finds erotic. The big difference is that David Cronenberg, who made Crash, knew that people were not turned on by auto accidents. Larry David, who wrote and directed Sour Grapes, apparently thinks people are amused by cancer, accidental castration, racial stereotypes and bitter family feuds... The more I think of it, the more Sour Grapes really does resemble Crash (except that Crash was not a bad film). Both movies are like watching automobile accidents. Only one was intended to be.
Aziz Ansari: "I was like a little girl at a John Mayer concert. “She stole my heart, man. It’s too much: the talent, the beauty. It’s more than this little Aziz can take.” I approached M.I.A. after her show, speaking in our native Tamil (“We’ve got a lot in common. Not a big deal.”). I said "Romba Nalla Paatu" which translates to "very good songs". She smiled, got in her car, and left. She didn’t contact me or anything after that. I guess we didn’t exchange information.” “People keep asking if she’s called me and I keep telling them no." http://www.funnyhumorclips.net/v/mia-story-aziz-ansari-featuring-eugene-mirman_34721.html, http://niralimagazine.com/2007/04/comedic-giant/
People are funny, because they can’t be happy. If they have somebody like Maria Callas in front of them, they always try to find something wrong, something bad, a few mistakes, you know? And maybe she had three voices, maybe she had three ranges, I don’t know — I am professional singer. Nothing disturbed me, nothing! I bought everything that she offered me. Why? Because all of her voices, her registers, she used how they should be used — just to tell us something! She had a message for us, a fantastic message. She had such a big power, and then she just disappeared.
I relish the fact that we New Yorkers talk funny, and that art deco skyscrapers symbolize our city. […] But we must set boundaries to this love of variety. I accept the need, even the blessings, of standardization in practical matters: we require a worldwide telephone dialing system and a network of national highways […]. We need domains of standardization, and realms of regionalism, each in its appropriate place, and linked in mutual respect and recognition. I accept and even want McDonalds at the highway interchange—but not in my little neighborhood of ethnic restaurants, and not next to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.
Stephen Jay Gould
• "Baseball : Joys and Lamentations", p. 309; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1993-11-04)
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stephen Jay Gould" (Sourced, Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003): Page references are to the W.W. Norton hardcover edition.)
In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? I'm not talking about blind optimism here... No, I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!
The world is amazed at how 'cruel' it is! (This is very funny to think about!) And then, when the 'chips are down' (Sartre's favorite expression), Sartre, who has never gambled but is enamored of the terminology of a kind of daring that doesn't involve getting his ass skinned, 'martyrs' himself. It is the same kind of responsibility anyone takes upon himself by submitting to your bad opinion of him by hanging his head and agreeing with all the accusations - and then, when he has done that, forlornly tells you he is sorry it rained last night, sorry the price of tea went up, etc. etc.
I know many people who like watching commercials because they're so funny. They provide relaxation and diversion. People come home after a day's work, from which they derive little satisfaction, and feel the need for diversion and amusement. The word diversion itself is already very significant. When Pascal uses the word diversion he means that people who follow the path of God deviate from the path which leads them to God as a result of diversion and amusement. Instead of thinking of God, they amuse themselves. So, instead of thinking about the problems which have been created by technology and our work we want to amuse ourselves.
There are two kinds of sex, classical and baroque. Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation's sake, and stereotypically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual relation ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration).
"For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents. The words 'My book,' as in 'I'll put that in it one day,' became a sort of running joke. Eventually she said, 'Look, I don't want to offend you, but you've been saying that for 25 years. If you were going to write a book, you'd have done it. You're never going to do it now. Old vets of 50 don't write books.' So I purchased a lot of paper right then and started to write."Margolis, Jonathan (Dec. 12, 2002). "But It Did Happen To A Vet". Time Magazine On being a vet
Elvis was always over the top. It's funny that in those days people who wanted to look like Elvis would wear leather jackets and jeans, because that's what he wore in his movies. In real life, Elvis never wore denim. He thought they were work clothes. When he had to wear them, when he was driving a truck, he would do but he always loved the way black entertainers dressed. He styled himself on them, because he wanted to be flamboyant. That's why he had that gold lamé suit! He designed his jumpsuits himself. He always said, "If you're going to be a star, you should look like one."
Mr. Lafferty says, "I'm the fellow who, for more than a quarter century, has faithfully maintained the thesis that all writers should be funny-looking and all stories should be funny. Almost all of the evil in the world is brought about by handsome writers doing pompous pieces. But sometimes readers tell me that such a story of mine is not funny at all. 'Wait, wait,' I tell them. 'You're holding it upside-down. Now try it.' And sure enough it is funny if they get ahold of it right. This caution is especially applicable to the story 'Junkyard Thoughts.' Be sure you're not holding it upside-down or it will be merely bewildering."'''
There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world. As this week's Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer Zoolander, a comedy about a plot to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia because of his opposition to child labor. You might want to read that sentence twice. The logic: Child labor is necessary to the economic health of the fashion industry, and so its opponents must be eliminated...if the Malaysians made a comedy about the assassination of the president of the United States because of his opposition to slavery, it would seem approximately as funny to us as Zoolander would seem to them.
Characters in Lafferty stories don't act or speak as normal folks do. Impossible things happen routinely. Indeed, the whole philosophical works are staged like a two-bit vaudeville act, with characters reminiscent of sideshow hucksters and midway card-sharps, promising marvelous prizes with one hand and taking your money with the other, leaving you wondering what the hell this thing is being put into your hands while you're being shuffled out the back door. But the prize here is the key to the kingdom, and the show is pretty funny. There is in fact no limit to Lafferty's humor — even the old banana-peel gag will be trotted out if it'll get a laugh.
Amir: You know how yesterday when I was like, "You probably don't get it?" When you make suggestions like that I'm pretty sure that you don't get any of these jokes. Like, what's funny about this one?
Jake: Kites are gay.
Amir: No. That's not it.
Jake: Ask me one and I'll tell you the joke.
Amir: Why is the "High Five" one funny?
Jake: Because "Torn" is gay!
Amir: No. It's not. The joke is never-
Jake: [interrupting]Okay, you're gonna deny that "Torn" is gay?
Amir: The joke is never "because blank is gay." That's never the joke. It's not because Kite is gay.
Jake: It helps. It helps the joke.
But trust me when I say that memories are funny things. Sometimes they're real, but other times they change into what we want them to be... But like I said, she's hurting, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that people in pain don't always see things as clearly as they should... And if it somehow doesn't work out between you, then you've got to understand that you can't look back anymore. It'll destroy you in the end, and destroy her as well. Neither one of you can keep living with regret, because it drains the life right out of you, and the very idea is enough to break my heart.
Being British in this part of the century meant living in the country that had Peter Cook in it. There are wits and there are clowns in comedy, I suppose. Peter was a wit, it goes without saying, but he was funny in an almost supernatural way that has never been matched by anyone I've met or even heard about. It wasn't to do with facial expression or epigrammatic wit, or cattiness or rant or anger or technique: he had funniness in the same way that beautiful people have beauty or dancers have line and grace. He had an ability to make people gasp and gasp and gasp for breath like landed fish.
War isn't a fraud, Charlie, it's very real. At least that's what you always tried to tell me, isn't it? That we shall never get rid of war by pretending it's unreal? It's the virtue of war that's the fraud, not war itself. It's the valor and the self-sacrifice and the goodness of war that needs the exposing. And here you are being brave and self-sacrificing, positively clanking with moral fervor, perpetuating the very things you detest merely to do "the right thing". Honestly, Charlie, your conversion to morality is really quite funny. All this time I've been terrified of becoming Americanized, and you, you silly ass, have turned into a bloody Englishman
It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. No one sees anything funny in a tree falling down. No one sees a delicate absurdity in a stone falling down. No man stops in the road and roars with laughter at the sight of the snow coming down. The fall of thunderbolts is treated with some gravity. The fall of roofs and high buildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down that we laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
But if you want to think about something really funny, consider how the titles of tyrants change. We shall suffer no more Emperors, Kings, Czars, Shahs, or Caesars, to lop off our limbs and burn our homes, kiddo, defile our women and bugger our boys; the masses make such appointments now; the masses love tyranny; they demand it; they dance to it; they feel that their hand is forming the First Citizen's Fist; so we shall murder more modestly in future: beneath the banners of Il Duce, Der Führer, the General Secretary or the Party Chairman, the CEO of something. I suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called Coach. -
[Jeff almost drops José Jalapeño.]
Peanut: Whoa! Oh, dude... I thought you were gonna drop him, oh, jeez... that woulda been... funny as hell!
José: Do not drop me, Señor!
Jeff Dunham: I won't drop you, José.
José: I would then be José Jalapeño on the floor!
Peanut: Do a little tap dance and we got salsa!
Jeff Dunham: That's terrible!
Peanut: Not with the right kind of chips, it's not!
Jeff: Stop it! I'm sorry, José.
José: It's okay. I kick his ass later.
Peanut: I'll turn your ass into guacamolé! I'll stir you with your own stick! This is the way we stir the guac, stir the guac, stir the guac! OLE!
I stepped out of the car on the rat king's arm, like a trophy wife--exept for the wrist sheaths and the two folding knives hidden in my clothing. Somehow I think trophy wives wear more makeup and less cutlery. But, Hey, I haven't met a trophy wife, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they know what I know, that the true way to a man's heart is six inces of metal between his ribs. Sometimes four inches will do the job, but to be really sure, I like to have six. Funny how phallic objects are always more useful the bigger they are. Anyone who tells you size doesn't matter has been seeing too many small knives.
Ever since I’d shown my bleeding arms to my sweetheart we hadn’t spoken a word. I’d simply decided to wait until she told me she appreciated carved tatoos. But she never did. She just ignored my obvious suffering. The pain in my gut, the secret gnawing at my belly didn’t concern her one damn bit. Things got so bad for me I finally took to smoking like all my buddies were already doing. I rolled up whole pages of old funny books and smoked the shit until my lungs ached. I’d cut vines from the ivy that crawled up the sides of the chicken coop and puff on my homemade cigars until my head buzzed.
While I didn't know it at the time, Daniel had suggested to Michael that I play Cora before we had ever met. And prior to our meeting, I was at a restaurant with John Bailey, the director, when I felt this man looking over in our direction and smiling a good deal. I realized, after leaving, that it was Daniel. He later told me that he was having lunch with Michael and had coincidentally asked him earlier that very day about me. It's just a funny thing, isn't it? And I was terribly flattered when he told me this tale. He was also very clear that the decision to cast me as Cora was all Michael's.
We forget what power these things originally had. The bardic tradition of magic whereby if someone puts a curse on you, it may sour your milk for a month, or burn your house down yeah yeah yeah. Someone puts a satire on you that will destroy you in the eyes of your friends, in the eyes of your family, in your own eyes. If it’s a particular good satire that’s well-worded and funny and clever, then five hundred years after you are dead, people will still be laughing at what a shit you were. That is destroyed. That’s not just making your cow sick. People understood that as a real power, which of course, it is.
Get up in the morning and you like your tea milky, You fumble for your glasses coz without 'em you cant see, It's funny how I come round your house and I'm 20 and I still have to wear all the presents you sent me. I walk into your kitchen everything's got a label, you done your Christmas shopping and we're only in April. And you wont leave the house unless your wearing your thermals, you're covered all in cat hair and you're stinking like Strepsils, Your heading down the Bowls Club, have another orange squash. Balls are rollin rollin rollin. You can't walk right coz things aren't what they were, your ankles are swollen swollen swollen.
If Imus had called me a "towheaded ho" or Al Sharpton a "nappy-headed ho," it would be what's known as "funny." (And if he called Anna Nicole Smith a "flaxen-headed ho," it would be "absolutely accurate.") But he attacked the looks and morals of utterly innocent women, who had done nothing to inject themselves into public debate. Imus should apologize to the Rutgers women — and those women alone — send them flowers, and stop kissing Al Sharpton's ring. This wasn't an insult to all mankind, and certainly not an insult to Al Sharpton. Now, if Imus had called the basketball players "fat, race-baiting black men with clownish hairstyles," well, then perhaps Sharpton would be owed an apology.
No End of Fun
So he got to have happiness,
he's got to have truth, too,
he's got to have eternity
did you ever!
He has only just learned to tell dreams from waking;
only just realized that he is he;
only just whittled with his hand né fin
a flint, a rocket ship;
easily drowned in the ocean's teaspoon,
not even funny enough to tickle the void;
sees only with his eyes;
hears only with his ears;
his speech's personal best is the conditional;
he uses his reason to pick holes in reason.
In short, he's next to no one,
but his head's full of freedom, omniscience, and the Being.
beyond his foolish meat—
did you ever!
Ernest Van Den Haag, a sociologist, wrote a fascinating book called The Jewish Mystique. I read that book, got a lot out of it, and went over to Ayn and said, “I’ve got to tell you something shocking.” Because we never thought of ourselves as Jewish in any important way, I announced, laughing, “We are both exponents of the Jewish messianic tradition. We believe we are here on earth to be signposts pointing to the good life.” What I got out of that book was how Jewish that was. The whole idea of these prophets coming along, or however he was describing it—it fit Ayn and me to a tee. I thought that was very funny. On the psychology of ideology:
Before Mr. Stewart, we didn’t expect much from nightly political humor. Late-night monologues were at best funny diversions, at worst toothless jabs pandering to the easiest stereotypes. ... The Daily Show didn’t just offer insightful, cutting analysis, clever parody and often hard-hitting interviews with major newsmakers. For an entire generation, it became the news, except this report could withstand the disruption of the Internet far better than the old media. If anything, the web only made The Daily Show, with its short segments, more essential. Every time a political scandal exploded or a candidate made headlines or a cable fight went viral, the first thought for many viewers was: I can’t wait to see what Jon Stewart will say about this.
I have lived my whole life on the stage and screen before you. I found purpose and meaning in your response. For an actor that is no greater loss than the loss of his audience. I can part the Red Sea, but I can't part with you, which is why I won't exclude you from this stage in my life.
For now, I'm not changing anything. I will insist on work when I can; the doctors will insist on rest when I must. If you see a little less spring in my step, if your name fails to leap to my lips, you will know why. And if I tell you a funny story for the second time, please laugh anyway.
I haven't tried to picture this war in a big, broad-minded way. I'm not old enough to understand what it's all about, and I'm not experienced enough to judge its failures and successes. My reactions are those of a young guy who has been exposed to some of it, and I try to put those reactions in my drawings. Since I'm a cartoonist maybe I can be funny after the war, but nobody who has seen this war can be cute about it while it's going on. The only way I can try to be a little funny is to make something out of the humorous situations which come up even when you don't think life could be any more miserable.
The Big Anachronism isn’t a particularly a subtle instrument, but it’s a versatile one. Used over and over in rapid succession—as in Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men In Tights — it works as a form of (low) comedy. Tossed in casually, at the edges of the main narrative, it rewards the older, better-informed, or more-attentive viewer. Set up artfully, it can draw that viewer’s attention to things that are uniformly funny on the surface and subtly thought-provoking beneath it. It can even work, quite successfully, in an awkward, clanking train wreck of a movie like Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).... Big Anachronisms exist to overcome uncertainty, and to eliminate any question of whether or not you’re supposed to notice.
Blue Velvet contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it's easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration. And yet those scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what's wrong with the movie. They're so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest and true. But Blue Velvet surrounds them with a story that's marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it's all part of a campy in-joke. … What's worse? Slapping somebody around, or standing back and finding the whole thing funny?
Once again we see Islam self-detonate (if you'll pardon the expression) and show once again why it's about as welcome on this planet as an asteroid. Once again we see thousands of Islamic nutcases take time out from beating up their wives to show their sensitive side. How? By smashing up the towns they live in, egged on by clerical ignoramuses whose motives are even lower than the literacy level of their followers. And once again we in the civilised world are being urged to censor ourselves out of respect for a religion that violates the human rights of half the people on the planet and that doubles as a political ideology indistinguishable from Nazism. It would be funny if it wasn't so obscene.
What is life? Life is like a big obstacle, put in front of your optical to slow you down, and every time you think you gotten past it, it's gonna come back around and tackle you to the damn ground. What are friends? Friends are people that you think are your friends, but they're really your enemies with secret identities and disguises to hide their true colors, so just when you're close enough to be brothers, they wanna come back and cut your throat when you ain't looking. What is money? Money is what makes a man act funny. Money is the root of all evil. Money'll make them same friends come back around swearing that they was always down. What is life? I'm tired of life!
Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air — explode softly — and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth — boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap either — not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination instead of death. A child who touched one wouldn't have his hand blown off.
It was funny to M'Cola [my African guide] to see a hyena shot at close range. There was that comic slap of the bullet and the hyena's agitated surprise to find death inside of him. It was funnier to see a hyena shot at a great distance, in the heat shimmer of the plain, to see him go over backwards, to see him start that frantic circle, to see that electric speed that meant he was racing the nickelled death inside him. But . . . the pinnacle of hyenic humor, was the hyena, the classic hyena, that- hit too far back while running, would circle madly, snapping and tearing at himself until he pulled his own intestines out, and then stood there, jerking them out and eating with relish.
"I know exactly when. I was hiding in a takima bush in the Queen's Garden, watching the older son of the Baron Erondites tell Attolia that he loved her. He was trying to prose a marriage and she thought he was talking about a poem he was writing. I was laughing like a very quiet fiend, trying not to make the branches around me shake, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, and to my complete surprise, it wasn't funny anymore." He rubbed his chest, as if a remembered pain. "I wanted to kill him. Once she was gone, I very nearly jumped out of the bush onto his head. Poor Dite." Poor Eugenides, thought Sounis, to fall in love with a woman he had already made into an enemy.
Some years back, after a childhood of preoccupation with comedy that led me to observing the styles of all the great comedians, I came to the conclusion that Groucho Marx was the best comedian this country ever produced. Now I am more convinced than ever that I was right. I can't think of a comedian who combined a totally original physical conception that was hilarious with a matchless verbal delivery. I believe there is a natural inborn greatness in Groucho that defies close analysis as it does with any genuine artist. He is simply unique in the same way that Picasso or Stravinsky are, and I believe his outrageous unsentimental disregard for order will be equally as funny a thousand years from now. In addition to all this, he makes me laugh.
I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or to anyone else. He is far too great to need any apologies from me. … His philosophical temper is, I believe, profoundly original and sane. It can of course be misunderstood. But it is basically simple and direct. It seeks, as does all the greatest philosoph­ical thought, to go immediately to the heart of things. Chuang Tzu is not concerned with words and formulas about reality, but with the direct existential grasp of reality in itself. Such a grasp is necessarily obscure and does not lend itself to abstract analysis. It can be presented in a parable, a fable, or a funny story about a conversation between two philosophers.
For the first twenty years of my life I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it's funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even make it to bed. I'd squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I'm now told that this is not called "going to sleep" but rather "passing out," a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.
Here's what I find wrong and here's what I find the common mistake the media makes. I can give you a hundred thousand Scientologists who will say unbelievably positive things about their church to every one you add on there, and I not only am upset about those people not being interviewed, they are, too. And the funny thing about it, and why you find this not really being that one who speaks in the media, is because not just myself, any Scientologist, will open up a paper, will watch this program, they're probably laughing right now, saying, "That isn't Scientology." That's what makes media. Media is controversy. I understand that. And if you really looked at the big picture of what's happening in Scientology, it isn't really controversial, certainly to a Scientologist.
People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back — providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
I guarantee you that thousands, hearing of Robin’s death, asked how he could do it when he had everything: fame, wealth, adulation, family love. And another supposed insulator against the worst of the blues, plenty of work. No combination of those adds up to insurance. And the hectic, nerve-wracking ups and downs of fortune in show business are, of course, a major factor for emotional disequilibrium. … I know Robin knew this. His death recalled a moment with him years ago in a small club. He came off stage after bringing a cheering audience to its feet. “Isn’t it funny how I can bring great happiness to all these people,” he said. “But not to myself.” The non-actor has a major advantage because it’s harder to hide the symptoms. The actor knows how to act.
The fact is we are all, no matter where we live, surrounded constantly by stories, whether they are literal, oral or visual...the benign story I'm really growing tired of is the "humorous" story of the blonde woman who is either injured or humiliated all in order to sell beer. Not funny. I am tired of these stories. I am angered by these stories. There are other stories far more wondrous — stories of women claiming and reclaiming power, stories of rage and resistance and indefatigable courage, and stories of women and some men — reaching across great divides and into the most treacherous places on Earth where turmoil reigns and violence against women is unchecked, taking the hands of those women, helping to lift them up and leading them toward safety and sanctuary and self-determination.
This I (still) believe: Fire is not necessarily your friend. Neither are dogs. Things with lit fuses should not be held onto. Beware the savage croquet ball. If it is -30 out, put on a coat before you leave the house. Just because the snow keeps you from seeing other objects the objects do not cease to exist. Clotheslines are the enemy of the bicyclist. If you don't remember how you got on the ground or where the blood came from, don't get up right away. Gym teachers think it's funny to commit assault with a baseball so don't day-dream during PE even if they have you so far in the outfield there are DEW line posts on either side of you. All guns are loaded. So are many bows. Trebuchets are for outside use only...
Lots of artists who paint have that experience to one degree or another, this release where their thinking doesn’t precede their doing. The space is shortened between thinking and doing. It’s a funny thing, what I really hate, yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation. You have to go through it, like somebody preparing for sacred vows, the sensation of you putting paint on, and it’s so boring to put paint on and to see yourself putting paint on. You’re really preparing for those few hours where some kind of umbilical cord is attached between you and it. You do it and the work is done and this cord seems to slacken, as if you left yourself there. And what a relief to leave yourself somewhere, to get out of it entirely.
Phillip Guston
• transcript of a public forum at Boston university, conducted by Joseph Ablow, 1966 ; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 68
• Source: Wikiquote: "Phillip Guston" (Sourced)
It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive. There were all kinds of things you learned. Like the 19th century novels, you saw how other social classes lived — especially the upper classes. So in a funny way, they taught you manners almost. But also moral manners. The gallantry of a Gary Cooper or an Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart. It was ethical instruction of a sort that the church purported to be giving you, but in a much less digestible form. Instead of these remote, crabbed biblical verses, you had contemporary people acting out moral dilemmas. Just the grace, the grace of those stars — not just the dancing stars, but the way they all moved with a certain grace. All that sank deep into my head, and my soul.
Some of the [band's] work has a genuine feeling behind it. Some of it is probably just being funny for the sake of being funny. Obviously, there are elements to "Detachable [Penis]" about male identity that are there, but not really overtly there. For the person who wants to find it, it's there. I don't know. I don't think... I like to think I'm not obvious about the humor, and I'm not obvious about the feelings, either. There's a certain degree of subtlety to what I'm doing; even in very obvious things, there's something underneath that's interesting. I think [the band is] guilty of being clever at times, to the detriment of conveying something more important, more real, more honest. I'll cop to that. But I will also say that there's also stuff that does have meaning.
I think the SDP really is a very right-wing party. In a funny way it’s more right-wing than Mrs. Thatcher because Mrs. Thatcher is an old-fashioned liberal, if you know what I mean, she believes in market forces and small government. But my knowledge and experience of the SDP is that they believe in a centralised system, they believe in a federal Europe in which we would only be a province under Brussels, they believe in retaining the American bases, they want a statutory pay policy so they would govern the wages of everybody without proper negotiation. I think they’re a very hard right party and I think the Labour Party which has now got a decent policy as a result of all the work we’ve done is going to pick up a lot of support this year.
I have always been interested in family history. Chromosomes are funny things, aren't they? They may skip a generation and you can find children who resemble the grandfather, rather than either parent. Heredity is more important than environment. Blood will tell. For example, a man is either musical by heredity or he is not. You can't make a man musical by the environment. You can find a person who is very musically inclined and be puzzled because neither parents nor grandparents had any ear for music. But if you trace it back, you will find that the great-grandfather was a musician. But the environment plays a great part in the development of a man. It is significant whether a man is brought up in the city or in the country, near a lake or on the shores of the ocean.
When I first met Kate I knew there was something very special about her. I knew there was possibly something that I wanted to explore there. But we ended up being friends for a while and that was a good foundation. I do generally believe now that being friends with one another is a massive advantage. It just went from there. I knew over the years, I knew that things were getting better and better and we went through a few stumbling blocks as every relationship does, but we picked ourselves up and carried on. From were you had the odd problem when you are first getting to know each other, those have all gone and it is just really easy being with each other, it is really fun and I'm extremely funny and she loves that so it's been good.
When the [Mystical Shit] CD first started to take shape, I was very unsure about what was happening—I wasn't sure I liked what these guys were coming up with. I missed Dogbowl's melodies, and I didn't like that it was loud. But other people seemed to like it a lot, and at that time, that was important to me, so I went with it. As time went by, I started to appreciate the oddity of me in a rock band. Unfortunately, I didn't really embrace the idea fully until that band had broken up. Nowadays, I can look back and think it was fun and funny that I was in a rock band, but at the time, it bothered me a lot and I complained about it all the time, but I lacked the moral character to do anything about it.
On the other hand, Hindi also uses lots of English words. They are read and pronounced as they are in English, but are written in Hindi. For example, डॉक्टर is pronounced doctor and स्टेशन is pronounced station. Other English words that are used are hospital, railway, train, cycle, motor, bus, car, cricket, football, tennis, judge, court. Therefore, if you want to say In Hindi it's common to find long words created by combining several other words. For example, किम्कर्तव्यविमूढ़ [kimkartavyavimoorh] means confused, bewildered, indecisive and लौहपथगामिनी [lauhpathgamini] is a word created to mean train. It means 'a thing which travels on an iron path' and is a combination of three words, 'iron', 'path' and 'traveller'. But this word is only used in a funny sense, mostly in jokes, the Hindi word used for train is रेलगाड़ी [railgadi] , literally 'rail vehicle'.
I recently published a book about movies I hated, and people have been asking me which reviews are harder to write — those about great movies, or those about terrible ones. The answer is neither. The most unreviewable movies are those belonging to the spoof genre — movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun and all the countless spin-offs and retreads of the same basic idea... the bottom line in reviewing a movie like this is, does it work? Is it funny? Yes, it is. Not funny with the shocking impact of Airplane! which had the advantage of breaking new ground. But also not a tired wheeze like some of the lesser and later Leslie Nielsen films. To get your money's worth, you need to be familiar with the various teenage horror franchises, and if you are, Scary Movie delivers the goods.
We sometimes got pretty light-hearted, and when Robby got involved was always a crowd. You knew something really funny was happening. But I never saw anybody so much aware of who came in that clubhouse door. He was concerned that if media people were there, it could be taken out of context and the feeling between the players would be lost. But when we were alone, oh gee – he and Tony would agitate each other back and forth and then Giusti would come in and they’d get going about the Puerto Ricans versus the Italians – screaming – and just loving every minute of it. But despite all the kidding, Roberto always insisted that you must never lose your dignity. ‘Tony,’ he’d say, ‘lose everything else, but never lose your dignity.’ He’d say it in a half-kidding tone, but you knew he meant it.
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.
NO ONE GETS OUT OF CHILDHOOD ALIVE. It's not the first time I've said that. But among the few worthy bon mots I've gotten off in sixty-seven years, that and possibly one other may be the only considerations eligible for carving on my tombstone. (The other one is the one entrepreneurs have misappropriated to emboss on buttons and bumper stickers: The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
(I don't so much mind that they pirated it, but what does honk me off is that they never get it right. They render it dull and imbecile by phrasing it thus: "The two most common things in the universe are..."
(Not things, you insensate gobbets of ambulatory giraffe dung, elements! Elements is funny, things is imprecise and semi-guttural. Things! Geezus, when will the goyim learn they don't know how to tell a joke.
Harlan Ellison
• Introduction to Blast Off : Rockets, Robots, Ray Guns, and Rarities from the Golden Age of Space Toys (2001) by S. Mark Young, Steve Duin, Mike Richardson, p. 6; the quote on hydrogen and stupidity is said to have originated with an essay of his in the 1960s, and is often misattributed to Frank Zappa, who made similar remarks in The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989): "Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe."
• Source: Wikiquote: "Harlan Ellison" (Quotes)
So, now the Republicans are going around — this is the kind of thing they do. I don't understand it. They are going around. They're sending like little tire gauges, making fun of this idea, as if this is Barack Obama's energy plan. Now, two points. One, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is. But the other thing is, they are making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 percent to 4 percent. It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant, you know? I mean, they think it's funny that they're making fun of something that is actually true. They need to do their homework, because this is serious business. Instead of running ads about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, they should go talk to some energy experts and actually make a difference.
I'm not sure, but I think I might be an adult.... Someone the other day told me I should act more like one, but I don't even know what it is. What's an adult? I blame it on my parents; they caught it before I was even born. When I break things now I have to pay for them. I rarely get cake at parties anymore. When people give me sheets of paper I'm not supposed to draw on 'em. I'm just supposed to put the letters of my name on a line. Where's the fun in that? People get funny when I say the obvious, like "you've got a big nose." All of a sudden I'm supposed to know about the weather. And have plans! I even checked on the internet and no one's working on a cure. I'm not sure I like it. http://www.zefrank.com/wiki/index.php/the_show:_06-06-06
And you know, what struck me when I first met Barack was that even though he had this funny name, even though he'd grown up all the way across the continent in Hawaii, his family was so much like mine. He was raised by grandparents who were working-class folks just like my parents, and by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills just like we did. Like my family, they scrimped and saved so that he could have opportunities they never had themselves. And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them.
But there is a solution, there is an answer, there is redemption available for all of us and any one of us, and to the Catholic Church, funny enough I think it is a novel by Morris West, The Pope could decide that all this power, all this wealth, this hierarchy of princess, bishops, archbishops, priests, monks, and nuns could be sent out in the world with money and art treasures, to put them back in the countries that they once raped and violated, whose original systems of animism and belief in simplicity they told them would (tell them) take them straight to hell. They could give that money away, and they could concentrate on the apparent essence of their belief. Then, I would stand here and say the Catholic Church may well be a force for good in the world. But until that day, it is NOT.
Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the particular moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.
I reread that book in the summer of '03. . . . And I hadn't looked at that book either since '91. And I was dreading it. I thought it was going to be a really terrible novel. Everything everyone had ever said about it was going to be true. . . . And I started reading it... and I was surprised. It was good. It was fun. It was not nearly as pretentious as I remember I wanted it to be when I was writing it. Not nearly as weighted down with the importance that I thought I was investing it with. I found it really fast-moving. I found it really funny. And I liked it a lot. The violence was... it made my toes curl. I really freaked out. I couldn't believe how violent it was. It was truly upsetting. I had to steel myself to reread those passages.
It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls - as little as one may like to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself.
I think I would like to be a Senator or something in twenty years. I don't think I really know enough yet. I'm just 30 now and I wouldn't even be eligible to run for office for another five years. But I have a lot of feelings about things. I know the way I would like to see things for this country and in my travels, when I talk to people, everybody wants pretty much the same thing: peace, enough jobs, no poverty and good education. And I've learned a lot. It's funny. So many people in show business go into politics, and I used to say "What the heck do they know about it?" But when you travel around, you really do get to feel — not to be cliche — the pulse of the country and what people want. I'm concerned and it's not good to be unconcerned and just sit there.
The set is a news desk, and the nice-looking man behind it seems... um, troubled. About his life, perhaps? About the news? A touch of indigestion? It's hard to tell, but it becomes clear—and quickly—that he is funny. And smart.
Jon Stewart presides over Comedy Central's The Daily Show, a blessed wedding of performer and format. Free of the burden of a full stand-up monologue, Stewart is able to put all his energy and wit into the news and guest spots. The word energy is almost too strong. Much of Stewart's humor seems to spring from an underlying terrain of world-weariness. [...] Repeat viewing of Stewart's shows reveals good things you missed the first time—smallish matters of voice shading, inflections and gestures begun but not completed. If you're a latecomer to his charms, you'll wish your alleged friends had demanded that you start watching a lot sooner. I'd like to see everything he has ever done.
I never had a strategy in my dealing with other humans! I've always been very passive socially. I went along with their agenda. I had none of my own! Left to my own devices I stayed in my room or wandered aimlessly in the streets, fantasizing about bizarre things I yearned to do to big ladies, or filled with self-pity and resentment. I was helpless in the presence of other people! My main concern was to make them like me by being as agreeable as possible, and secondly to impress them with my brilliance, my sharp wit, my originality, and my fundamental saintliness. Over time, and after years—decades—of diligent practice, I became very good at this cute little performance of mine. But this performance was improvised in the moment, catered to suit whoever I happened to be with. There was no strategy. It was always an effort. Only in solitude was I completely relaxed. Funny thing...
He was an extraordinary bloke. First of all he was very funny. He was straight but very camp. [He] came in and Visconte said, ‘Right, what are we doing?’. He said: ‘Well I haven’t got any material, I’ve just got one guitar riff’. So he played us this guitar riff. It sounded a bit like Chuck Berry to me but I didn’t say anything. He went out with the band and after two hours he said, ‘Right, got a song’. So we recorded it and took a few takes. He then said, ‘Right I’ve got a bit of a tune, just give me half an hour’. In 10 minutes he came back and said, ‘Right I’ve got the lyrics and got the tune’. So he’d written Get It On in 10 minutes basically. He went out there, sang it and in four or five takes we’d got it. There it was. The guy was absolutely astonishing."
Two altogether opposed political stances can each draw an audience's attention. One is to be politically consistent, but nonetheless original in one's insights; the other, an inchoate form of apostasy, is to bank on the shock value of an occasional, wildly inconsistent outburst. The former approach, which Chomsky exemplifies, requires hard work, whereas the latter is a lazy substitute for it. … The master at this pose of maverick unpredictability used to be Christopher Hitchens. Amidst a fairly typical leftist politics, he would suddenly ambush unsuspecting readers with his opposition to abortion, admiration of the misogynist and juvenile lyrics of Two Live Crew ("I think that's very funny"), or support for Columbus's extermination of Native Americans ("deserving to be celebrated with great vim and gusto"). Immediately the talk of the town became, "Did you read Hitchens this week?" Although a tacit assumption equates unpredictability with independence of mind, it might just as well signal lack of principle.
It's said that Chaplin wanted you to like him, but Keaton didn't care. I think he cared, but was too proud to ask. His films avoid the pathos and sentiment of the Chaplin pictures, and usually feature a jaunty young man who sees an objective and goes for it in the face of the most daunting obstacles. Buster survives tornados, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders, and falls from great heights, and never pauses to take a bow: He has his eye on his goal. And his movies, seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising, how without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.
Because he was funny, because he wore a porkpie had, Keaton's physical skills are often undervalued … no silent star did more dangerous stunts than Buster Keaton. Instead of using doubles, he himself doubled for his actors, doing their stunts as well as his own.
Mr. Speaker, I once again find myself compelled to vote against the annual budget resolution for a very simple reason: it makes government bigger. [...] We need to understand that the more government spends, the more freedom is lost. Instead of simply debating spending levels, we ought to be debating whether the departments, agencies, and programs funded by the budget should exist at all. My Republican colleagues especially ought to know this. Unfortunately, however, the GOP has decided to abandon principle and pander to the entitlements crowd. But this approach will backfire, because Democrats will always offer to spend even more than Republicans. When Republicans offer to spend $500 billion on Medicare, Democrats will offer $600 billion. Why not? It’s all funny money anyway, and it helps them get reelected. [...] The increases in domestic, foreign, and military spending would not be needed if Congress stopped trying to build an empire abroad and a nanny state at home.
And again, don't misunderstand. I am not here bashing people who are homosexuals, who are lesbians, who are bisexual, who are transgender. We need to have profound compassion for people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life, and sexual identity disorders. This is a very real issue. It's not funny, it's sad. Any of you who have members of your family that are in the lifestyle — we have a member of our family that is. This is not funny. It's a very sad life. It's part of Satan, I think, to say this is "gay". It's anything but gay. It's profoundly sad to recognize that almost all, if not all, individuals who have gone into the lifestyle have been abused at one time in their life, either by a male or by a female. There's been profound hurt and profound things that have happened in almost all of their lives.
(A woman phones in to Caroline Bosman's radio programme and asks whether it is true that Dr Ellingham hates the sight of blood)
Bert Large:-(Listening to programme in the pub) Doc Martin'll see the funny side, he'll just go with the flow.
Caroline Bosman:-Next caller. You are live...
Martin:-(Phoning in to Caroline's radio programme) This is Doctor Martin Ellingham. I'd like to get a few things crystal clear for you and your puerile listeners. I admit to having certain difficulties but they have not and they never will impair my functions as a doctor. And for the record, the incident with a certain village plumber was in fact a prank with some ketchup which, by the way, kept me from attending to patients in my surgery.
(Ranting)
Dr. Martin Ellingham:-As to the so-called homeopathic remedies, if there's one for chronic infantilism then I suggest that your caller and the entire village embark on a course immediately. Thank you.
I don't think I've met anyone as exceptional as Robin was … every moment … could be explosive any which-way, you didn’t know where it was going to go — you didn’t know even where it came from — he seemed to be able to channel the Cosmos, and at the same time he was always totally involved with the people around him, he really had a close touch with everybody he touched. He was absolutely extraordinary. … He seemed to be able to be … a kind of receptor of all knowledge, whatever it was, whether it was in the news, something from an encyclopedia, or from a book, he seemed to know all of this stuff, and he could then reassemble it, in the most incredible combinations — which was always surprising, funny and … outrageous, really, and I don't know how he did it. … That was always the miracle of Robin, it was something I've never bean able to explain.
Yes, I was a funny guy for a long time. When I started out, I just wanted to write humor. I wrote humor for kids. My very first book was called How to be Funny. It was about how to get big laughs at the dinner table and how to get laughs in school. Parents hated this book. I wrote joke books, like A Hundred and One Monster Jokes, and other joke books for years. I did maybe a hundred of them. I had a great time, and I did this humor magazine called Bananas for ten years. It was sort of Mad Magazine, but it was all in color, and it was great. That was all I ever wanted to do. I couldn't believe it. When that ended, I figured I would just coast for the rest of my career. That was it. I'd already done what I wanted to do. I had no idea what was coming up.
Q: You seem relatively upbeat and sociable. It’s funny, because I’ve always had this idea of you, like, always crying in the dark. A: Most people do. Q: Do you care about that? A: Oh, no. It doesn’t bother me. Whatever people think of me is fine, however they want to envision me. I find it curious. I’m always intrigued by who people think I am and the persona they have created for me, what they think I’m into, what they think I’m not into. But I certainly understand that consideration, that I would be a bleak and miserable person, because a lot of my lyrics are very despondent. Luckily, I have the music to use as catharsis. If I didn’t, I might spend more time sitting and crying in a corner than I need to. Also, I think manners are very important. To be a sullen rain cloud when conversing with someone, be they your friends or a journalist, I think is inappropriate.
First I'd like to address the hecklers (cause I know you're out there!) ... There are people who contribute, people who create, and people who destroy. ... Nobody likes hecklers — nobody likes heckling — it's not interesting, it's not funny, it's certainly not appreciated, and it's of no use and no good. And it just hurts people. And I'm not sure if the intention is to hurt people, in which case you are evil — and if not, that's what you are doing, so it is not constructive, at all. The whole idea of 'I must be honest, so here is what I think' is complete baloney. If there is information you must transmit to another, you must do it empathically, or it is worthless. ...
Essentially, what I have for you heckler victims is this: If you do what you must, and you do what is right, you are bulletproof! Don't bother changing — don't listen to any of that garbage — because it's garbage!
Look at the girl I did Urban Legends with, my last big hit, in '98. One of the girls in that, Alicia Witt — who was on the TV series, Cybill — she without a doubt did the best work on television last year when she guest-starred on the most difficult show to guest star on, which was The Sopranos. She played a non-Italian mafia type on The Sopranos — she was the best thing in the hour. To me, this girl is outstanding. This girl has movie star potential. Now, she was in Cecil B. Demented. I'm just amazed she's not a much bigger star already — not out of any disappointment in Alicia. But I just can't believe the town hasn't just sort of like scooped her up and made her as much of an "It Girl" as, for instance, Goldie Hawn's daughter or Gwyneth Paltrow, because I think this girl is really — and she's also genuinely funny in a wonderful, sexy, screwball comedy way.
Well it wasn't a formal hanging. It was kind of subtle. I had covered him … his first press conference. He dropped down into the press room and started taking questions and everyone asked about the tax cut and I sort of — Ari Fleischer later told me I blindsided him because I said to him, "Mister President, why don't you respect the wall of separation between church and state?" Well, there's a video of him that is so funny. He jerked back as if he had been hit! I mean both barrels! And he said, "I do respect—" I said, "Well if you did, why would you have a religious office in the White House?" (I'm exaggerating, but anyway) and "you're a secular official." And he said "I am secular." Well, anyway, I got a call from Ari after that. After that there was a formal news conference and I did ask him a Middle East question and it wasn't the question per se. They just don't like my boorishness.
I used to hang out with Bryan down at The Rec. They were going to a comic book show, Kevin, Bryan and Walter. Bryan invited me and told Kevin that Jason Mewes kid's gonna come. And Kevin was like, "Oh, man, I don't want that dude going." He's like, "I ain't driving him." And Bryan was like, "All right. I'll drive." Kevin tells the story better, but when we were driving up — I don't remember, really, but he said I was saying all this stuff and Bryan and Walter were laughing and the whole time he was like, "This guy ain't funny. He ain't funny." He seemed like he really didn't like me. I think that was the first time I met him — he didn't want me coming with them to the comic book show. He didn't even know me, really, but he just didn't want me going. And then one day at The Rec I wound up doing something funny and that's when he started to like me.
All schizophrenia patients are mad, and none are sane. Their behaviour is incomprehensible. It tells us nothing about what they do in the rest of their lives, gives no insight into the human condition and has no lesson for sane people except how sane they are. There's nothing profound about it. Schizophrenics aren't clever or wise or witty — they may make some very odd remarks but that's because they're mad, and there's nothing to be got out of what they say. When they laugh at things the rest of us don't think are funny, like the death of a parent, they're not being penetrating, and on other occasions they're not wryly amused at at the simplicity and stupidity of the psychiatrist, however well justified that might be in many cases. They're laughing because they're mad, too mad to be able to tell what's funny any more. The rewards for being sane may not be very many but knowing what's funny is one of them. And that's an end of the matter.
What a queer work the Bible is. ...Some texts are very funny. Deut. XXIV, 5: "When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business: but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken." I should never have guessed "cheer up" was a Biblical expression. Here is another really inspiring text: "Cursed be he that lieth with his mother-in-law. And all the people shall say, Amen." St Paul on marriage: "I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn." This has remained the doctrine of the Church to this day. It is clear that the Divine purpose in the text "it is better to marry than to burn" is to make us all feel how very dreadful the torments of Hell must be.
Went for a walk, whistling. Saw a throne in a window. I said: What chair is this? Is it the one great Ferdinand sat in, when he sent the ships to find the Indies? The seat is frayed. Hardly a day passes without an announcement of some kind of marriage, a pregnancy, a cancer, a rebirth. Sometimes they drift in from the Yukon and other far places, come in and sit down at the kitchen table, want a glass of milk and a peanut-butter-and-jelly, I oblige, for old times’ sake. Sent me the schedule for the Little League soccer teams, they’re all named after cars, the Mustangs vs. the Mavericks, the Chargers vs. the Impalas. Something funny about that. My son. Slept with What’s-Her-Name, they said, while she was asleep, I don’t think that’s fair. Prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights. They went away, then they came back, at Christmas and Eastertide, had quite a full table, maybe a dozen in all including all the little...partners they’d picked up on their travels....
A man of the most kindly and gentle spirit; unassuming, quiet, and the last person that one would suppose to be possessed of qualities that made him famous... He was a very genial man, and there were one or two funny stories that I used to tell him that amused him greatly, especially one that described a fight between two camp-women at Fort Union. I lived in Santa Fe the winter of 1863 and 1864, and he was there at the time, and almost always when I met him he would stop and make me tell him that story. He also used to lend me his horse to ride. It was a very ordinary looking yellow horse, and a pacer, and by no means the prancing steed that he is always pictured as mounted upon. He was so unassuming and kind-hearted that he won me completely, for I was only a boy of seventeen or eighteen, and to have Kit Carson notice me and seem attracted to my yarns meant a great deal to me.
All anyone’s got is theories, usually distorted by what they’ve been through or what they want. This book, for example, was written by someone from a suburban, broken home, raised in Thatcher’s Britain, where inclusive ideas and family values were dismantled. A culture in which fame and celebrity became deified and drug use among the young extremely prevalent. Where modern manifestations of tribal identity like trade unions or guilds became redundant, manufacturing industries disappeared, neoliberalism emerged, and the welfare state was all but abolished. You could probably predict the contents of this book by looking at my weekly shopping receipt from Tesco’s. Alright, Waitrose. I’m dying to paint myself as a lowborn, Wat Tyler, Essex messiah; fortunately, I’m not quite that mad. I know that that heroic myth is part of my programming. That I’m quite a funny, normal bloke, that there’s a bit of bad in the best of us and a bit of good in the worst of us, that any centralized power structure with an egocentric figure at its helm will become corrupt.
The bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that—no big deal. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skillful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were.
Poetry
• Alan Moore in "The Craft" - interview with Daniel Whiston, Engine Comics (January 2005).
• Source: Wikiquote: "Poetry" (Quotes: Alphabetized by author or source)
Now if you're just out of the mainstream, if you don't have blind Bush love, you are somehow suspect. Don't ever let them tell you that. Be out of the mainstream. I'm out of the mainstream. I enjoy it, who wants to be in the mainstream? When Ronald Reagan was running, he would always say 'it's morning in America' and everybody would smile and I would think 'yeah but, I'm not a morning person'. I'm the guy who thinks religion is bad and drugs are good. I think children aren't innocent, god doesn't write books, and Jesus wasn't a republican. I think girls hate each other, no doesn't mean no and being drunk is funny. I'm for mad cow disease, how am I gonna win that? I'm against suing tobacco companies. I think abstinence is a perversion. I think Bush's lies are worse than Clinton's. I think Vegas was better when it was run by the mob. I think men are only as loyal as their options. I think stereotypes are true and rehab is for quitters.
However obvious these facts may appear at first glance, they are actually not so obvious as they seem except when we take special pains to think about the subject. Symbols and things symbolized are independent of each other; nevertheless, we all have a way of feeling as if [...] there were necessary connections. For example, there is a vague sense we all have that foreign languages are inherently absurd; foreigners have such funny names for things, and why can't they call things by their right names? This feeling exhibits itself most strongly in those tourists who seem to believe that they can make the natives of any country understand English if they shout loud enough. Like the little boy who was reported to have said, "Pigs are called pigs because they are such dirty animals," they feel that the symbol is inherently connected in some way with the thing symbolized. Then there are the people who feel that since snakes are "nasty, slimy creatures" (incidentally, snakes are not slimy), the word "snake" is a nasty, slimy word.
However obvious these facts may appear at first glance, they are actually not so obvious as they seem except when we take special pains to think about the subject. Symbols and things symbolized are independent of each other; nevertheless, we all have a way of feeling as if [...] there were necessary connections. For example, there is a vague sense we all have that foreign languages are inherently absurd; foreigners have such funny names for things, and why can't they call things by their right names? This feeling exhibits itself most strongly in those tourists who seem to believe that they can make the natives of any country understand English if they shout loud enough. Like the little boy who was reported to have said, "Pigs are called pigs because they are such dirty animals," they feel that the symbol is inherently connected in some way with the thing symbolized. Then there are the people who feel that since snakes are "nasty, slimy creatures" (incidentally, snakes are not slimy), the word "snake" is a nasty, slimy word. (p.27)
Shiva and Parvati were sitting on mount Kailash where Shiva lives and he was giving a class – a lecture – to a number of sages who had come to take his darshan. And Parvati was sitting on his lap. Now these sages were all ascetics – all celibate – and Shiva himself was sitting there, a very detached person, with his wife sitting on his lap – a very attractive wife. And this maharaja Chitraketu was passing by and he saw this scene and he thought it was very funny that all these ascetics and Shiva were sitting together having a class on spiritual life and detachment with this beautiful woman sitting on his lap with his arm around her. And he laughed. And no one took it seriously except Parvati. And Parvati thought this was offensive to her husband so she cursed Chitraketu that he would have to take life as a demon. So there’s this little kind of vignette of the character of Shiva and Parvati. Shiva very detached, never takes offense, and Parvati takes all his offenses on his behalf...
He made a list of authors that floored me, beginning with Sinclair Lewis, William McFee — at that time famous for Casuals of the Sea, Command, Captain Macedoine's Daughter — and Vincent Sheehan and Mignon Eberhardt. Well, those were the plums, and he said, "I don't know if I can get any of them." Well, he got them all--every single one of them! … McFee was quite deaf and like so many deaf people he shrieked at the top of his lungs and had a funny habit — he'd grab you by the ear and scream into your ear. Of course, he couldn't hear. He'd start screaming in Harry Maule's ear and Harry would try to quiet him down. I still remember that we used to fall on the floor laughing at McFee and Harry Maule. What a combination this was. He was a nice man — McFee — an old sea captain. Unfortunately he drifted off and lost his popularity, but he did write three fine books: Casuals of the Sea, Captain Macedoine's Daughter, and Command. I think they're as good as Conrad's Sea Tales.
Have you heard about the kid who lost his head at Six Flags? The first time I read it, I thought, "Oh my God...How can I make this funny for everybody?"...Here goes. What happened was, he was in a church youth group and he lost his hat during the roller coaster. Afterwards, he was like, "I'm going to go get my hat." And there was a big fence with signs that said, "Hey, cut your losses." And he was like, "What? Have you SEEN me in that hat? Not today, fence!" So, he climbed that fence, and then there was another fence with a sign that probably said, "Hey, come on, knock it off." He was like, "You can't tell me how to live, signs!" And he climbed over that fence and there, the story ends. Did he get the hat? I'd like to think he did. That small silver lining, "Hey, I got my hat!" Then whack, right then! And I know he was on a church youth group and they don't believe in evolution, but that kid was going to get picked off sooner or later.
The other major impression to emerge from Magick Without Tears is that -- as odd as it sounds -- one of Crowley's chief drawbacks was his sense of humour. This is a disability he shares with Bernard Shaw: both were driven by a strange compulsion to be flippant. But when he becomes absorbed in an idea, Shaw can remain serious for a sufficiently long time to convince the reader of his intellectual stature. In Crowley, the flippancy has the tone of a schoolmaster trying to be funny for the benefit of the sixth form, or a muscular Christian trying to convince you that he isn't really religious. 'How can a yogi ever feel worried? . . . That question I have been expecting for a very long time!' (Crowley has never learned that exclamation marks give the impression of a gushing schoolgirl.) 'And what you expect is to see my middle stump break the wicket-keeper's nose, with the balls smartly fielded by Third Man and Short Leg!' It makes us aware that there was something wrong with Crowley's 'self-image.' He is one of those people who, no matter how hard they try, never feel quite grown up.
The perception of you is one thing. You're this famous person, and now you're this famous person who's a bombshell. So all of a sudden, that's the only way I get jobs. So I have to become the part. And they're telling you this is the way to do it. One director actually said to me, "I want to hear you talk dumber and faster." … He thought it was funny for the girl to be dumb. I finally said, "That's it, man — I can't do this anymore." I'd go to meetings during the filming of a movie, and the directors would ask, "What do you think of the script?" I'd say, "It has a lot of problems." They were confused. That's not what they wanted from me. … So I was not very popular. At one point I said, "I don't want to do this — it's not my dream." And so I said, "I'm going to start a company. I am going to create projects for me. I'm going to create projects for other Latin women." Because I got to a point where I was whining all the time. I was miserable. I was desperate
A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He is perfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in a reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. I was a foreigner in America; and I can truly claim that the sense of my own laughable position never left me. But when the native and the foreigner have finished with seeing the fun of each other in things that are meant to be serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dangerous ground of things that are meant to be funny. The sense of humour is generally very national; perhaps that is why the internationalists are so careful to purge themselves of it. I had occasion during the war to consider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to have arisen between the English and American soldiers at the front. And, rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that they arose from the failure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he is humorous. And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke.
About the eroticism of Anthony Burgess, it is interesting to notice that we never find ‘penetrative Eros’ either in twosome, threesome or a roomful of people. Anthony is, more than reticent, endowed with what used to be called ‘Christian modesty’ (which is also, Muslim, Jewish Orthodox Fundamentalism and Hindu, be it said). The grosser form of the sexual act is, very effectively, either - and this is more often the case - suggested by sequences of rhythmical images, as in Tremor of Intent when Miss Devi’s seduces Rupert Hillier in his ship cabine and her initial seduction followed by his response are evoked in a splendidly rhythmical crescendo (I’ve heard him read the pages aloud during a lecture given in Oklahoma or Denver), or, funnily and matter-of-factly, in a foreign language, as when, in a case of rape brought by Malay assistant against a small Chinese shopkeeper, her employer, while the prosecution goes on about "had he done this and he done that, and had there been any attempt to, shall we say, force his attention on her, and had he perhaps been importunate in demanding her favours"… The interpreter, having listened very patiently, just asks the girl, ‘Sudah masok?’ and she replies, quick as a flash, ‘Sudah.’
First, his style sucks you in right away. He's a very funny guy who talks fast and keeps the jokes coming, gets everyone liking him, gets them relaxed and laughing. And nodding. Then he takes examples of science questioning itself and calls that stupid. While you're still chuckling about how silly science is, he starts cherry-picking questions science doesn't even pretend to have an answer for, and he calls science stupid. Then he points out places where science made mistakes and says "stupid" again. What he doesn't say is what's really going on. Because what would really be stupid is if scientists didn't keep looking for better answers, and if they didn't admit when they made a mistake. But they do. That's how we know what the mistakes are. That's where Hovind gets them - from science itself. Hovind says the Bible answers questions that evolution is too stupid to know. What he won't say is that we're supposed to believe the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true. He picks on science because it questions itself, because it requires proof - even from itself. What I get is that the only proof Mr. Hovind requires is that the Bible's assertion that the Bible is correct.
All the Sixties were complicated, you know. On the one hand it was funny too, you know; on the other hand it was cruel, you know. The communists are so cruel, because they impose one taste on everybody, on everything, and who doesn't comply with their teachings and with their ideology, is very soon labeled pervert, you know, or whatever they want you call it, or counterrevolutionary or whatever. And then the censorship itself, that's not the worst evil. The worst evil is — and that's the product of censorship — is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself. I am stopping to being honest, I am becoming hypocrite — and that's what they wanted, they wanted everybody to feel guilty, they were, you know... And also they were absolutely brilliant in one way, you know: they knew how effective is not to punish somebody who is guilty; what Communist Party members could afford to do was mind-boggling: they could do practically anything they wanted — steal, you know, lie, whatever. What was important — that they punished if you're innocent, because that puts everybody, you know, puts fear in everybody.
It all goes back to Neil Gaiman. In the foreword to “Fragile Things,” he wrote that his short story “Sunbird” was his way of trying to write his own R.A. Lafferty story. So I found “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” and it’s like nothing I’ve ever read before. It’s very blue-collar science fiction – all the familiar tropes of people going to outer space and to other planets. It’s hilarious, incredibly funny and at the same time it’s insanely dark. You get the feeling like it’s a guy just writing to amuse himself: “I don’t care if any of this makes sense, but I want to see weird stuff happen.” One of his stories starts off, “He began by breaking things that morning.” There’s a short story called “Ginny Wrapped in the Sun,” and it’s just about this little girl who’s super strong, running around, picking things up. You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence – even if the story doesn’t totally cohere, you feel like it’s about something. It’s so incredibly Tulsa. You get that feeling when you see a Flaming Lips show. It’s not like we’re dark and hurt and twisted. It’s like, "I’ve got blood on my face – come on, y’all, this is awesome."
He was one of the most dignified human beings I ever met, but he also could be very funny. Last year, we went to have breakfast in San Francisco. There was an elderly black woman in the restaurant who keeps looking at Clemente. Finally she comes over and says, "Mr. Blue, can I have your autograph?" "I’m sorry," he says, "but I’m not Vida Blue." "Oh!" she says and walks away. Roberto looks at me, shrugs his shoulders and says with a smile, "See? That’s fame and fortune for you." The time I’ll never forget is when we went to a Chinese restaurant in Philadelphia. There were three of us – Roberto Clemente from Puerto Rico, Eddie Acosta of Panama, and me, a Hungarian. A real old Chinese waiter comes over. Roberto says to him, ‘We want sweet and sour pork, duck almond, fried rice, wonton soup – but we don’t want individual servings. We want it all in big dishes so we can serve ourselves." The old Chinese waiter looks at me, a real puzzled look on his face. So there we are – a Panamanian, a Hungaraian, a Puerto Rican, and a Chinaman. Roberto is laughing. He stands up and says real loud: "For Heaven’s sake, doesn’t anyone speak English in this joint?"
About Roberto Clemente
Les Banos (Pirates official photographer and frequent dinner companion of Clemente during his final few years) in Clemente! (1973) by Kal Wagenheim, p. 221
• Source: Wikiquote: "Roberto Clemente" (Quotes about Clemente, Other: Alphabetical, by author/speaker.)
I must go over into the interior valleys. … There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them, with the Fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line, and yelling for a balanced budget. In one tent there were twenty people quarantined for small pox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I've tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can do something to knock these murderers on the heads.
Do you know what they're afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities they will organize, and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporate farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without them. … The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering. … I'll do what I can. … Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies.
Something funny I have noticed—perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? They want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can click your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a café table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the “New Establishment” issue of Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London; they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortar and Do Not Disturb signs and views of the park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a way to pump episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (ADD TO SHOPPING CART), they will do it.
Proceeding on the assumption that the reader of this preface is interested in the development of my musical talent, I will try to explain, as concisely as I can, how, in this respect, my personal wheels go round. To begin with, I have only had two music lessons in my life. These were the first steps of what was to have been a full course at the Guildhall School of Music, and they faltered and stopped when I was told by my instructor that I could not use consecutive fifths. He went on to explain that a gentleman called Ebenezer Prout had announced many years ago that consecutive fifths were wrong and must in no circumstances be employed. At that time Ebenezer Prout was merely a name to me (as a matter of fact he still is, and a very funny one at that) and I was unimpressed by his Victorian dicta. I argued back that Debussy and Ravel had used consecutive fifths like mad. My instructor waved aside this triviality with a pudgy hand, and I left his presence forever with the parting shot that what was good enough for Debussy and Ravel was good enough for me. This outburst of rugged individualism deprived me of much valuable knowledge, and I have never deeply regretted it for a moment.
Katie Couric: You've cited Alaska's proximity to Russia as part of your foreign-policy experience. What did you mean by that?Sarah Palin: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land — boundary that we have with — Canada. It, it's funny that a comment like that was — kind of made to — cari— I don't know. You know. Reporters —Couric: Mocked?Palin: Yeah, mocked, I guess that's the word, yeah.Couric: Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials.Palin: Well, it certainly does because our— our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia—Couric: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?Palin: We have trade missions back and forth. We— we do— it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where— where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is— from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to— to our state.
(When asked about his Westwood experiences) Westwood was a fantastic place to work, with great people, great games we created, and we all really loved what we did. We were passionate about it. I have so many great memories there, and the ironic thing is I actually regret not having attended more of the fun company functions and parties while I was instead playing club gigs with bands with the mentality of trying to get signed or discovered. Granted thats the kind of thing you try for when you're young, but it took awhile to sink in, that my real future and career was already under my nose. Lots of funny stuff happened. Office pranks, fun extra content we created, certain personalities that always made you laugh. Just all of life's experiences along the way whether it was staying in an awful hotel on a business trip, or trying to set-up an embarrassed co-worker with a date, it's all great stuff you can laugh about later. When Westwood closed it was truly the end of an era, but in a way it has been resurrected at Petroglyph where I am now. Half the company are old Westwood employees and although it's a different time in the industry, we are all thankful to still be working together and making the best games we can.
Generally, Kalki’s writings are well received by the people. There are two reasons for this. One thing is there will be humour in all his essays. Even in the saddest situation he will find something funny. … There was something very interesting about his writings. Writing the way he did, was something very great at that time, because there were no precedents to his writing style. Neither to his style or genre nor to the way the magazine was written. People talk about it even now. They say there is nothing that Kalki has not done, there is nothing left to be done. There is no scope of starting something new. Because, Kalki had experimented with everything, when it comes to the world of magazines... be it short stories, essays, cartoons, travelogues... he went to Sri Lanka in the 1930s and wrote a travelogue on Sri Lanka. People there were fanatical about Kalki. He was very popular there.
Even when he used to deliver a speech somewhere, it used to be full of humor. So people never used to allow him to speak first at any function. Because once he is through with his talk, the audience will walk away. So he used to invariably deliver only the vote of thanks. Even that used to be so funny, people used to be literally rolling on the floor.
Perhaps the greatest play I’ve ever seen Roberto make was in Nicaragua, in 1964 or 1965, after San Juan won the title in the Caribbean Series. They had Clemente, Cepeda, Pizarro, Conde, Pagán – it was like an all-star team! [...] But during that series, Roberto made such a fantastic play that they nearly raised a monument in his honor out in right field. Ossie Echevarria, a Panamanian, one of the fastest men in baseball, was the runner on first base. A ball was hit to right-center, nearly by the wall. Normally, any runner would make it from first to third on such a hit, especially a guy like Echevarria. Clemente cut the ball off and threw it right into Wito Conde’s glove at third – that ball looked like a jet! The runner was tagged out, and every fan in the ballpark just stood there – mouth open in amazement. They’d seen plenty of top players over the years, but never had they seen a throw like that! Three innings later, the same situation: Echevarria on first, another hit. Roberto cut it off and fired to third. Echevarria was between second and third base. When he slammed on the brakes, it looks so funny, like a character in a Walt Disney cartoon! He threw himself headlong back to second base. Incredible! It was impossible to run against Roberto’s arm.
Jane took me to another level because she's truly a wonderful writer. I'd put things together in the past and struggled with them. And then I met Jane. … I was doing my Edith Ann album in '71 — the album came out in '72. She'd done a thing on television called J.T. — it was about a kid in Harlem — and she won a Peabody for it. I later learned it was the first thing she'd ever written.
It was written as an After School Special, but they played it in prime time — and they played it every year after that for about 25 years, or something. Anyway, I saw it and it was wonderful. It was poetic and sensitive and satiric and tender and funny and so many things compressed into this one hour. And I thought, "Oh, God, this is exactly what I want in a monologue." So I wrote Jane and asked her to help me do the Edith Ann album. I didn't hear from her for a while. Then, suddenly, about a week before I was supposed to go in and record, she sent me a lot of material. I persuaded her to come to California and help me produce it. Frankly, I was pretty taken with her as soon as I saw her. We just sort of clicked. We became a couple right away.
JG: Can I ask what your feelings are about God?
EV: Sure. I think it's like a movie that was way too popular. It's a story that's been told too many times and just doesn't mean anything. Man lived on the planet -- [placing his fingers an inch apart], this is 5000 years of semi-recorded history. And God and the Bible, that came in somewhere around the middle, maybe 2000. This is the last 2000, this is what we're about to celebrate [indicating about an 1/8th of an inch with his fingers]. Now, humans, in some shape or form, have been on the earth for three million years [pointing across the room to indicate the distance]. So, all this time, from there [gesturing toward the other side of the room], to here [indicating the 1/8th of an inch], there was no God, there was no story, there was no myth and people lived on this planet and they wandered and they gathered and they did all these things. The planet was never threatened. How did they survive for all this time without this belief in God? I'd like to ask this to someone who knows about Christianity and maybe you do. That just seems funny to me... (sic) Funny strange. Funny bad. Funny frown. Not good. That laws are made and wars occur because of this story that was written, again, in this small part of time.
He was very leary of the media. He was misquoted a lot of times, and they made fun of the way he spoke. They made him sound like one of those Indians in the movies. He was a proud man and this really got to him. He had fierce pride. He was proud of being a Puerto Rican. He was proud that he served in the military service here. He was proud that he was in the Marine Corps. He trained at Parris Island in South Carolina. That was the toughest kind of training soldiers had to go through. I remember this one time he was late getting to the dressing room when we were playing in San Francisco. He walks to his locker, and we tell him he better hurry up and get in uniform. He said something about how fast a guy could get dressed – something he had learned in the Marine Corps. He said, ‘I’ll be undressed and dressed in three minutes.’ I bet him he couldn’t do it. And I put the clock on him. That sonofagun was in full uniform in less than three minutes. A lot of times he’d run out onto the field with his pants unbuttoned, or his glove on top of his head as he pulled at his belt. And he’d be hollering, ‘Where’s my glove? Where’s my glove?’ I’m telling you – he was a funny, funny man.
...one of the funny things about experimentalism in regard to language is that most of it has not been done yet. Take “mothball” and “vagina” and put them together and see if they mean anything together; maybe you’re not happy with the combination and you throw that on the floor and pick up the next two and so on. There’s a lot of basic research which hasn’t been done because of the enormous resources from the past which have precluded this way of investigating language. I wrote a story once called “Bone Bubbles” which did just this—put together unlike things—and everyone who has ever read it has loathed it. The editor of the book in which it appears didn’t want it in there. I insisted that it should be in there. I am still interested in that story and intend to work more on this rather simple-minded principle of putting together more or less random phrases—but not so random as all that. This particular piece—which is only about eight pages long—was not easily written, was not whacked out, it was rewritten and rewritten and rewritten, and in one sense it still is as nonsensical at the end of this rather arduous process as it was in the beginning except that to me it seemed right. The writer in the twentieth century who went farthest in this direction is of course Gertrude Stein, for perhaps other motives, but it’s part of her enterprise—she’s a greatly misunderstood writer, and that’s where I would locate experimentalism.
Kids are not stupid. They are among the sharpest, cleverest, most eagle-eyed creatures on God's Earth, and very little escapes their notice. You may not have observed that your neighbor is still using his snow tires in mid-July, but every four-year-old on the block has, and kids pay the same attention to detail when they go to the movies. They don't miss a thing, and they have an instinctive contempt for shoddy and shabby work. I make this observation because nine out of ten children's movies are stupid, witless, and display contempt for their audiences, and that's why kids hate them. Is that all parents want from kids' movies? That they not have anything bad in them? Shouldn't they have something good in them — some life, imagination, fantasy, inventiveness, something to tickle the imagination? If a movie isn't going to do your kids any good, why let them watch it? Just to kill a Saturday afternoon? That shows a subtle kind of contempt for a child's mind, I think. All of this is preface to a simple statement: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is probably the best film of its sort since "The Wizard of Oz." It is everything that family movies usually claim to be, but aren't: Delightful, funny, scary, exciting, and, most of all, a genuine work of imagination. Willy Wonka is such a surely and wonderfully spun fantasy that it works on all kinds of minds, and it is fascinating because, like all classic fantasy, it is fascinated with itself.
David Mills: Wait, I thought all you did was kill innocent people. John Doe: Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny? An obese man … a disgusting man who could barely stand up; a man who if you saw him on the street, you'd point him out to your friends so that they could join you in mocking him; a man, who if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn't be able to finish your meal. After him, I picked the lawyer and I know you both must have been secretly thanking me for that one. This is a man who dedicated his life to making money by lying with every breath that he could muster to keeping murderers and rapists on the streets! David Mills: Murderers? John Doe: A woman … David Mills: Murderers, John, like yourself? John Doe [interrupts]: A woman … so ugly on the inside she couldn't bear to go on living if she couldn't be beautiful on the outside. A drug dealer, a drug dealing pederast, actually! And let's not forget the disease-spreading whore! Only in a world this shitty could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that's the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it's common, it's trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore. I'm setting the example. What I've done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed … forever.
Deuce Bigalow is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes. … Does this sound like a movie you want to see? It sounds to me like a movie that Columbia Pictures and the film's producers … should be discussing in long, sad conversations with their inner child.
The movie created a spot of controversy... Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed [2004's] Best Picture nominees and wrote that they were "ignored, unloved, and turned down flat by most of the same studios that … bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic."
Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: "Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind. … Maybe you didn't win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven't invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who's Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers..." As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."
Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.
Mark Twain
• Letter to Helen Keller, after she had been accused of plagiarism for one of her early stories (17 March 1903), published in Mark Twain's Letters, Vol. 1 (1917) edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, p. 731.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Mark Twain" (Quotes, Various)
[After Data Sora fixes Transverse Town.]
Jiminy: It's another entry!
Mickey: Hmm...It looks like to me like a new message gets added every time a world inside the journal is repaired.
Donald: Yeah! Just like before.
[After defeating the Guard Armor with them, Sora places his hand on top of Donald Duck and Goofy’s hands as the scene shifts to Pluto finding a Corridor of Darkness and jumping into it.]
Donald: That's funny. We were there... Was Pluto with us?
Jiminy: Well, I sure didn't write anything like that in the Journal.
Goofy: Hey, do you fellas think that maybe the Journal's tryin' to tell us somethin'?
[Shadows suddenly appear.]
Mickey: Heartless?
Jiminy: Here, in the castle? But how?
[Mickey dispatches the Shadows]
Mickey: We gotta check the rest of the castle now!
[They find the doors stuck.]
Mickey: It won't open!
[He, Donald, and Goofy are unable to force the doors open.]
Jiminy: This is not our day.
Mickey: Well, fellas...I hate to say this, but we're trapped.
Donald: We're what!? But there could be Heartless roaming the castle.
[A new Journal entry appears]
Jiminy: What' that? "Undo the hurt to unbar the way."
Goofy: Gwarsh, we're tryin'. It said we've already undone some of it, right?
Mickey: Well then, we'll just have to keep going, repairing the journal's data as fast as we can.
Jiminy: Your Majesty. I think Sora just might've reached the next world!
[A scene of Sora in Wonderland.]
Donald: But we gotta do something about the castle.
Mickey: I'm as worried as you re, Donald, but right now our best hope is fixing up the journal.
Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernal, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly smail portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.
Plagiarism
• Mark Twain, letter to Helen Keller, after she had been accused of plagiarism for one of her early stories (17 March 1903), published in Mark Twain's Letters, Vol. 1 (1917) edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, p. 731.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Plagiarism" (Sourced)
Today I walked into the sunset — to mail some letters — … But some way or other I didn’t seem to like the redness much so after I mailed the letters I walked home — and kept walking - The Eastern sky was all grey blue — bunches of clouds — different kinds of clouds — sticking around everywhere and the whole thing — lit up — first in one place — then in another with flashes of lightning — sometimes just sheet lightning — and some times sheet lightning with a sharp bright zigzag flashing across it -. I walked out past the last house — past the last locust tree — and sat on the fence for a long time — looking — just looking at — the lightning — you see there was nothing but sky and flat prairie land — land that seems more like the ocean than anything else I know — There was a wonderful moon. Well I just sat there and had a great time by myself — Not even many night noises — just the wind — … I wondered what you were doing - It is absurd the way I love this country — Then when I came back — it was funny — roads just shoot across blocks anywhere — all the houses looked alike — and I almost got lost — I had to laugh at myself — I couldn’r tell which house was home - I am loving the plains more than ever it seems — and the SKY — Anita you have never seen SKY — it is wonderful —
Georgia O'Keeffe
• Canyon, Texas, letter to Anita Pollitzer (September 11, 1916), from The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe & Anita Pollitzer, edited by Clive Giboire (Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster Inc., New York, 1990), pp. 183-184
• Source: Wikiquote: "Georgia O'Keeffe" (Quotes, 1910s)
The apparent multiplicity of Gods is bewildering at the first glance; but you presently discover that they are all the same one God in different aspects and functions and even sexes. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible Gods… Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolater are equally at home in it.
Islam is very different, being ferociously intolerant. What I may call Manifold Monotheism becomes in the minds of very simple folk an absurdly polytheistic idolatry, just as European peasants not only worship Saints and the Virgin as Gods, but will fight fanatically for their faith in the ugly little black doll who is the Virgin of their own Church against the black doll of the next village. When the Arabs had run this sort of idolatry to such extremes … they did this without black dolls and worshipped any stone that looked funny, Mahomet rose up at the risk of his life and insulted the stones shockingly, declaring that there is only one God, Allah, the glorious, the great… And there was to be no nonsense about toleration. You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell. Mahomet was a great Protestant religious force, like George Fox or Wesley….
There is actually a great Hindu sect, the Jains, with Temples of amazing magnificence, which abolish God, not on materialist atheist considerations, but as unspeakable and unknowable, transcending all human comprehension.
George Bernard Shaw
• Letter to the Reverend Ensor Walters (1933), as quoted in Bernard Shaw : Collected Letters, 1926-1950 (1988) by Dan H. Laurence, p. 305; Shaw actually errs here in characterizing Jainism as simply a sect of Hinduism, as it is usually regarded as a separate and independent tradition, though Hindu and Jain philosophers have long had influence on each other, as well as other traditions
• Source: Wikiquote: "George Bernard Shaw" (Quotes)
We talked about the size of the baby, Ann and I. What could be deduced from the outside. I said it doesn’t look very big to me. She said it’s big enough for us. I said we don’t need such a great roaring big one after all. She said they cost the earth, those extra-large sizes. Our holdings in Johnson’s Baby Powder to be considered too. We’d need acres and acres. I said we’ll put it in a Skinner box maybe. She said no child of hers. Displayed like a rump roast. I said you haven’t wept lately. She said I keep getting bigger whether I laugh or cry. Dear Ann. I don’t think you’ve quite... What you don’t understand is, it’s like somebody walks up you and says, I have a battleship I can’t use, would you like to have a battleship. And you say, yes yes, I’ve never had a battleship, I’ve always wanted one. And he says, it has four sixteen-inch guns forward, and a catapult for launching scout planes. And you say, I’ve always wanted to launch scout planes. And he says, it’s yours, and then you have this battleship. And then you have to paint it, because it’s rusting, and clean it, because it’s dirty, and anchor it somewhere, because the Police Department wants you to get it off the streets. And the crew is crying, and there are silverfish in the chartroom and a funny knocking sound in the No. 2 hold, and the chaplain can’t find the Palestrina tapes for the Sunday service. And you can’t get anybody to sit with it. And finally you discover that what you have here is this great, big, pink-and-blue rockabye battleship.
The Russians are primitive folk. Besides, Bolshevism is something that stifles individualism and which is against my inner nature. Bolshevism is worse than National Socialism — in fact, it can't be compared to it. Bolshevism is against private property, and I am all in favor of private property. Bolshevism is barbaric and crude, and I am fully convinced that that atrocities committed by the Nazis, which incidentally I knew nothing about, were not nearly as great or as cruel as those committed by the Communists. I hate the Communists bitterly because I hate the system. The delusion that all men are equal is ridiculous. I feel that I am superior to most Russians, not only because I am a German but because my cultural and family background are superior. How ironic it is that crude Russian peasants who wear the uniforms of generals now sit in judgment on me. No matter how educated a Russian might be, he is still a barbaric Asiatic. Secondly, the Russian generals and the Russian government planned a war against Germany because we represented a threat to them ideologically. In the German state, I was the chief opponent of Communism. I admit freely and proudly that it was I who created the first concentration camps in order to put Communists in them. Did I ever tell you that funny story about how I sent to Spain a ship containing mainly bricks and stones, under which I put a single layer of ammunition which had been ordered by the Red government in Spain? The purpose of that ship was to supply the waning Red government with munitions. That was a good practical joke and I am proud of it because I wanted with all my heart to see Russian Communism in Spain defeated finally.
Poor Robin Williams, briefly enduring that lonely moment of morbid certainty where it didn’t matter how funny he was or who loved him or how many lachrymose obituaries would be written. I feel bad now that I was unduly and unbefittingly snooty about that handful of his films that were adjudged unsophisticated and sentimental. He obviously dealt with a pain that was impossible to render and ultimately insurmountable, the sentimentality perhaps an accompaniment to his childlike brilliance. We sort of accept that the price for that free-flowing, fast-paced, inexplicable comic genius is a counterweight of solitary misery. That there is an invisible inner economy that demands a high price for breathtaking talent. … Robin Williams could have tapped anyone in the western world on the shoulder and told them he felt down and they would have told him not to worry, that he was great, that they loved him. He must have known that. He must have known his wife and kids loved him, that his mates all thought he was great, that millions of strangers the world over held him in their hearts, a hilarious stranger that we could rely on to anarchically interrupt, the all-encompassing sadness of the world. Today Robin Williams is part of the sad narrative that we used to turn to him to disrupt. … we must reach inward and outward to the light that is inside all of us … Do you have time to tune in to Fox News, to cement your angry views to calcify the certain misery? What I might do is watch Mrs. Doubtfire. Or Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting and I might be nice to people, mindful today how fragile we all are, how delicate we are, even when fizzing with divine madness that seems like it will never expire.
But that has changed when a few months later during a lull in the battle of the attack on Verdun, he was telling his comrade a dirty anecdote. To his amazement, his buddy did not laugh: “Kutscher, didn’t you find that one funny?” The reaction of poor fellow to joke was no longer a laughing matter: a shrapnel of an enemy grenade struck him right into the heart - he collapsed dead to the ground. "I still see myself on the edge of the trench. A bright light, brighter than the atomic bomb struck me: he is now standing before holy God! And the next thought was: if we had sat in different arrangement, then the splinter grenade would have hit me instead, and then I would be standing face-to-face before God right now! My friend was laying dead in front of my eyes. For the first time in many years, I folded my hands and uttered a prayer, which consisted of only one sentence: "Dear God, I beg You, do not let me fall before I'll be sure not go to hell!"" A few days later, he then entered with a New Testament in the hand a broken French farmhouse, fell to his knees and prayed: "Jesus! The Bible says that you have come from God in order to save sinners. I am a sinner. I cannot promise anything in the future, because I have a bad character. But I do not want to go to hell, if I get a shot. And so, Lord Jesus, I surrender myself to you from head to foot. Do with me whatever you want!" Since there was no bang, no big movement, I just went out. I had found the Lord, a gentleman to whom I belonged."''БУШ (Busch), ВИЛЬГЕЛЬМ (Wilhelm) (1995), Приди домой (Come home), language: Russian, page: 8, pages: 158, place: Bielefeld, publisher: CLV, Christliche Literatur -Verbreitung, ISBN: 3-89397-721-X, retrieved: 2011-11-19
Dr. Roberts says, "Hello, girls . . . how are we today? Are you all ready? Okay. Hop up. Put all your weight on this leg. Okay? ready? My god, this rear end looks like a battlefield." You went to hear something I wrote about the horror of speed? Well, maybe you don't but the nearly incommunicable torments of speed, buzzerama, that arcylic high, horrorous, yodeling, repetitious echoes of an infinity of butally harrowing that words cannot capture the devastation nor the tone of such a vicious nightmare. Yes, I'm even getting paranoid, which is a trip for me. I don't really dig it, but there it is. It's hard to choose between the climactic ecstasies of speed and cocaine. They're similar. Oh, they are so fabulous. That fantabulous sexual exhilaration. Which is better, coke or speed? It's hard to choose. The purest speed, the purest coke, and sex is a deadlock. Speeding and booze. That gets funny. You get chattering at about fifty miles an hour over the downdraft, and booze kind of cools it. It can get very funny. Utterly ridiculous. It's a good combination for a party. Not for an orgy, though. Speedball! Speed and heroin. That was the first time I had a shot in each arm. Closed my eyes. Opened my arms. Closed my fists, and jab, jab. A shot of cocaine and speed, and a shot of heroin. Stripped off all my clothes, leapt downstairs, and ran out on Park Avenue and two blocks down it before my friends caught me. Naked. Naked as a lima bean. A speedball is from another world. It's a little bit dangerous. Pure coke, pure speed, and pure sex. Wow! The ultimate in climax. Once I went over to Dr. Roberts for a shot of cocaine. It was very strange because he wouldn't tell me what it was and I was playing it cool. It was my first intravenous shot, and I said, "Well, I don't feel it." And so he gave me another one, and all of a sudden I went blind. Just flipped out of my skull! I ended up wildly balling him. And flipping him out of his skull. He was probably shot up . . . he was always shooting up around the corner anyway.
Edie Sedgwick
• Edie from tapes for the movie Ciao! Manhattan, on her first experiences with heavy drugs.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Edie Sedgwick" (Sourced, Edie : American Girl (1982): Quotes of Sedgwick from Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton.)
Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run. And some of them, the only ones that were really dangerous, believed so firmly in the rightness of their cause that they believed it was permissible to lie and deceive in order to further it. They even taught this to their children, from infancy. These are the "red-diaper babies," children of hardline members of the Communist Party of America, and some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of political action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoyance of honest socialists and others on the left.Today we have a similar phenomenon brewing on the religious right: the inevitability of the End Days, or the Rapture, the coming Armageddon that will separate the blessed from the damned in the final day of Judgment. Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with the Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to "hasten the inevitable," not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. And these people are not funny at all. They are dangerous, for the same reason that red-diaper babies are dangerous: they put their allegiance to their creed ahead of their commitment to democracy, to peace, to (earthly) justice — and to truth. If push comes to shove, some of the are prepared to lie and even to kill...
Mr. Shaw cannot realise his own pertness, nor can he preserve his own gravity, for more than a few moments at a time. Even when he sets out to be funny for fun's sake, he must needs always pretend that there is a serious reason for the emprise; and he pretends so strenuously that he ends by convincing us almost as fully as he convinces himself. Thus the absurdity, whatever it be, comes off doubly well. Conversely, even when he is really engrossed in some process of serious argument, or moved to real eloquence by one of his social ideals, he emits involuntarily some wild jape which makes the whole thing ridiculous — as ridiculous to himself as to us; and straightway he proceeds to caricature his own thesis till everything is topsy-turvy; and we, rolling with laughter, look up and find him no longer on his head, but on his heels, talking away quite gravely; and this sets us off again. For, of course, when seriousness and frivolity thus co-exist inseparably in a man, the seriousness is nullified by the frivolity. The latter is fed by the former, but, graceless and vampire-like, kills it. As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality he is immortal. Posterity will not, I fancy, read his writings. He has not enough of the specific art-sense for writing. I will not exasperate him by complaining that he has no sense of beauty in the use of his medium: the idea of beauty is a red rag to him, as we know. I will merely suggest that he has in his writing the qualities of a public speaker rather than of a writer. He does not write with that closeness which is the result not of haste but of leisure, and which is the main secret of good literature. He is too glib, too fluent, too diffuse, and too loud. Glibness and fluency, loudness and diffusion, are just the qualities needed for addressing an audience. But between speaking and writing there is a vast difference. A good writer cannot make good speeches, and Mr. Shaw's seems an instance to prove that a good speaker cannot write well. We, his contemporaries, can read him with delight, even though we seem to miss the reporter's interpolation of "laughter", "cheers", "interruption", and so forth. But relentlessly, in course of time, lack of solid form "tells on" writing. However interesting a writer may be, he will not, unless he be a strict artist, be read by posterity. Style, as has been said, is the one antiseptic. But, though Mr. Shaw's writing be not good enough for the next generation, he himself, being so signally unique, is good enough for all time. I wish I had the leisure to be his Boswell, and he the kindness to be my Johnson.
His view with regard to morals and their relation to religion may best be seen from the following words addressed by Momus to Jove: “It will be sufficient if you put an end to that lazy tribe of pedants, who, without doing good, according to the divine and natural law, consider themselves, and wish to be considered, as religious men, agreeable to the gods, and declare that it is not by pursuing good and shunning evil that men become worthy and pleasing to the gods, but by believing and hoping according to their catechism." Elsewhere, he makes Wisdom say: “Wherefore, it is an unworthy, foolish, profane, and reprehensible thing to think that the gods demand reverence, fear, love, worship, and respect for any other good end or utility than those of men themselves, inasmuch as being perfectly glorious in themselves, and therefore unable to add any glory to themselves from without, they have made laws, not so much to obtain glory from men as to communicate glory to them. Hence, laws and judgments fall short of the goodness and truth of law and judgment, just in proportion as they fail to order and approve, above all other things, that which consists in the moral actions of men with respect to each other." I doubt whether the Society for Ethical Culture could frame a better statement of the relation between ethics and religion than this of Bruno's. Reading this, we are at no loss to understand why Bruno, though he spent some time in Geneva, and afterward in Protestant England and Germany, never became a Protestant. He appears, from recently discovered documents, to have got into considerable trouble at Geneva; and no wonder, when he puts into the mouth of Wisdom words like the following, concerning the chief reformers: “While they say that all their care is about invisible things, which neither they nor anybody else ever understood, they maintain that, in order to obtain grace, all that is required is fate, which is immutable, but which is determined by certain affections and fancies on which the gods are especially fond of feeding." Indeed, his contempt for the doctrines of the reformers, who exalted faith as all-potent for salvation and despised works and a moral life, is without bounds. His treatment of the doctrine of predestination is not only contemptuous, but funny.
I think I need not say anything more to convince you that Bruno was one of the mighty, one of those strange, incomprehensible, pioneer geniuses that lived centuries before their time, destined, apparently, to lay out the tasks for many succeeding ages. He rose not only above the dogmas and superstitions of half-obsolete mediaeval Catholicism, but, with equal ease and firmness, above the new follies of growing Protestantism. He belongs not to the sixteenth century, but to the nineteenth, and even to the elite of it. Great in philosophy, great in science,— physical and moral, — he was greater still in practice, in life and in death. No man ever labored more or suffered more, in order to be free himself and help others to be so. No one ever met death more firmly and heroically. Among the martyrs for truth and freedom, — those first essentials of manhood, — he occupies the highest place.
Punk: Wow, everybody, it's John Cena. He comes out here every Monday night, he's excitable, he throws his hat at somebody, everybody loves it. I am so impressed at how you do that. You get all these people to believe you're that friendly, smiling, everyday man, when I know the truth. And the truth, John Cena, is you're thoughtless, you're heartless, and above all else, you are dishonest. I'm sure there's millions of people worldwide, including yourself, that would love to believe this is over a spilled diet soda, but John, this goes way beyond my spilled diet soda. Yeah. John, you were fired from the WWE. You were gone. You gave a very tear-inducing speech in the middle of the ring about how you finally get to see your mom and hang out with your little brother, and you said you were gonna go away. You were gonna be a man of your way, but what happened? You came back later that night, and then you came back the next week, and then you came back the next week, showing all of these people who aren't intelligent to see through your facade what I have known all along—that your word is absolutely worthless. And then there's TLC, you have the man beaten. Wade Barrett, a very tough individual, and you have him beat in a chairs match, but that's not good enough for you. You don't take the high ground, you can't walk off into the sunset with your victory; you drag the man off to the side of the stage and you drop fifteen steel chairs on him, and I wanna know exactly why you think that's acceptable behavior. I wanna know why you think it's okay to show up the next night on Raw and humiliate the poor guy...
Cena: That is balderdash! Fifteen steel chairs? That's insane. It was 23 steel chairs. And in case you forgot, Wade Barrett and the Nexus gave me about five thousand beat-downs, made me their personal slave, and ended my career.
Punk: You wanna talk about ended careers, you hypocrite? This is exactly what I'm talking about. You ended the career of my good friend Dave Batista. John! John, look at me when I'm talking to you. This is a reoccurring pattern with you. Once again, you have the man beaten—last man standing, he verbally submits, how humiliating, the match is won. But, no, you AA him off a car through the very steel ramp that I'm sitting on, which facilitated the end of his career. Now we'll talk about Vickie Guerrero. I'm surprised the lovely Vickie Guerrero doesn't up and quit based on all the abuse you heap on her. It's not just the physical things to the Wade Barretts and the Dave Batistas, but it's the name-calling, it's the mental abuse to somebody as gorgeous and beautiful as Vickie Guerrero.
Cena: "It's the this...it's the that." Okay, CM Punk is gonna play Mr. Fingerpointer. Well...1.—Dave Batista broke my neck; 2.—He showed up on Raw the next night and quit on his own terms. And C—I didn't just single out Vickie Guerrero. In case you haven't been watching for the past...eight years, I talk about everybody. Uh...Michael Cole. Michael Cole has an anonymous fetish with Justin Bieber and has the word "The Miz" man-scaped right below his belly button. Me! Look at me. I look like the crazy sex child of the Incredible Hulk and Grimace. And then there's you.
Punk: Yeah, and then there's me, who happens to not be laughing. I don't know if you noticed that. You're not funny.
I tried. I tried so hard to empathize with all of your weaknesses. I implored every single one of you to just say "no," and all my empathy got was for you to love Jeff Hardy that much more than you already did. But this will not deter me. I will stay the course; I still believe in teaching you people the difference between right and wrong. (Audience chants "Hardy!") Oh, obviously it's gonna be challenging, listening to you people, and by the looks of some of you, it's gonna be a big challenge. But just like any other challenge that's come down the pipe in my lifetime, I'm gonna meet that challenge head on like a man, just like I did last week. Let's take a look. (Recap of Punk's assault on Hardy) See, now I know why you people love Jeff Hardy so much. It's because you are all just like him; and, in turn, Jeff Hardy is just like all of you. The reality is, none of you have the strength to be straight-edge. (Audience resumes chant) You gravitate towards Jeff because it's the easy way out: it's easier to weak like Jeff, because you sure can't be strong like me. Oh, you can boo all you want. I know why you boo, you know why you boo. It's because I tell the truth. And the truth sometimes hurts, doesn't it? For instance, what does it say on your prescription bottle of pills? "Take one every four hours"? Well, don't tell me you people don't gobble four, six, eight at a time like they were Pez. That is drug abuse—I don't do that. I also don't smoke, and those who do are stupid. You gotta be stupid to not listen to the Surgeon General, especially when he prints the warning label on the package of smokes. You gotta be a fool. And we can talk about those funny cigarettes, and you obviously know what I'm talking about because you cheer, and that's utterly sad. That's pathetic. I...I can't even wrap my head around you people cheering, 'cause when you smoke those funny cigarettes, not only is that hazardous to your health, it's also illegal. So those who have taken a puff, not only are you poisoning yourself, you're also breaking the law, so the vast majority of everybody here in this arena is a criminal. I am not a criminal—I never have been, and I never will be. Now let's talk about alcohol. I've saved the best poison for last, see because this is a gateway drug. Don't tell me not a single one of you here has ever said, "I'm gonna go out for one drink," and one leads to two, and two drinks leads to three, and then it's a double of this, and a shot of that, and then your head winds up in the toilet, night in and night out. Congratulations, that is alcoholism. And in my book, if you even take one drink, you're an alcoholic. So I understand why you people love Jeff Hardy so much, I understand why Jeff loves you—it's because you're all weak. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, you deserve better. This entire world deserves better. What you need is a leader. You need a strong leader who's gonna stand up in the face of adversity and just say "no." You need a strong leader that's gonna carry the banner of the World Heavyweight Championship with honor, with pride, respect, dignity, integrity, and class. What you people need is a straight-edge World Heavyweight Champion. You need CM Punk.
I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark almost blue color, and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Data Sora: Who are you? I't's like when I met Mickey...Do I...know you?
Namine:Nice to meet you. My name is Namine. You don't know me, but I know you.
Data Sora: Um...I don't really follow.
Mickey: I'll explain. At one point, you lost all of your memories, Sora. Namine here is the person who saved you.
Data Sora: Wow, then I owe you alot!
Namine: No, you really don't. It's true I pt your scattered memories back together, but I'm also the one who took them apart in the first place. Not only that, the bugs that appeared in Jiminy's journal--those were my fault, too.
Mickey: What do you mean?
Namine: It all began with these memories that were sleeping way down deep in Sora's heart.
[A white sphere appears.]
Data Sora: These are my memories?
Namine: No. Not yours. These belong to people connected to you.
Data Sora: What? Isn't it weird for somebody else's memories to be inside me?
Namine: Right, it's not usually possible. When I first found them while repairing your memory, I thought I'd made a mistake. But all the evidence I found proved they belong in your heart, where they're been sleeping a long...long time. One day, Sora will have to have to call them to the surface. They're important memories...but very dangerous ones.
Mickey: Dangerous how?
Namine: These memories are too painful. Handled the wrong way, they could damage Sora's heart--even break it. I needed you to find a way to face that kind of hurt That's why I left the message.
Mickey: "Their hurting will be mended when you return to end it." That was you?
Namine: When I unraveled Sora and the other's memories, you remember it also erased the words from Jiminy's journal. Well, that shows how deeply the journal and Sora are connected. When I took Sora's memories apart, they stayed in his heart---and in the journal even after the text was gone. That's why you were able to render them as data.
Mickey: But the data was a mess because of all those bugs. Jiminy never wrote any of that stuff down.
Namine:No...that was me. When I added these memories, I added "hurt". I thought that...maybe if you fought the bugs that sprung from these memories, you might learn to face the hurt in the memories themselves.
Mickey: Gosh, you sure went through a lot of trouble
Namine: I'm sorry. I wish I could have told you all this in person. But the real me is gone
Data Sora: Um...guys? This is all way over my head. Am I dumb?
Namine: Of course not. After all, you did it. You learned how to face the hurt.
Data Sora: I did?
Namine: Some people think pain is something you just wipe away--and sometimes, maybe ,you can But not all pain can be erased. The only way to deal with it is to accept it head-on. And if the hurt is too great for you to bear it alone--well, then you turn to a friend close to your heart.
Data Sora: Because the hurt will bring us closer together, and make us stronger. Right, let's give it a try.
Namine: Huh?
Data Sora: With the memories you found, I'm ready to accept them, no matter how painful they are.
Namine: Sora....
Mickey: Wait! I'll join you
Data Sora: Okay!
Namine: Thank you. Touch this, and the memories locked inside will flow into your hearts.
[Sora touches the orb, feeling the pain as Mickey touches it as well.]
Mickey: Stay strong, Sora!
[Images of Axel, Roxas, Namine, and Xion appear.]
Namine: These people are waiting for Sora--the only one who can put an end to their hurt. DiZ told me...he hid something inside you during the year you were asleep. I asked him what, nd all he would say was that he was "clearing his conscience." Sora must be the key to saving the people you saw--and the ones you're about to see.
[Images of Terra, Aqua, and Ventus appear.]
Mickey: It can't be!
Namine: Mickey, maybe you know how much they're hurting. These three were keys, too. They were connected to the truth behind the Keyblade. And they're still connected, Sora, somewhere way down deep inside of you.
Data Sora: Funny, I feel as though...I've met them.
Namine: Yes, two of them, you have met. As for the third one...I never realized it, but...you and he share a very special connection.
Data Sora: Yeah...
Mickey: Namine. You said Sora has to call these memories to the surface. Is it time?
Namine: I can't say for sure. But I do know a day will come when they must rise from their sleep. And then, the only one who save them...will be Sora.
Mickey: The bond they ll share--that's gonna be the key, right? Don't worry, Namine. I'll make sure I pass this on to Sora--you know, the one in the outside world!
Namine: Mm, please do. Well--
Data Sora: Just a second.
Mickey: Huh?
Data Sora: Our promise...Your promise to the me I don't know. You et it, right?
Namine: I may be gone, but my promises to him are forever. And anyway...I owe this much. For all the...all those people that I hurt.
Data Sora: So what happens to YOU--the one that's right here?
Namine: I'm really just data made to pass along a message. I shouldn't...exist right now in this journal at all. And now, the record of me will dispear. But when you pass my message on to the other Sora, just remember to tell him the things that you've seen...and that you've felt. If you do that, then we'll be at rest--her, and me too. Along with everybody connected to Sora...
Data Sora: Namine, you got it. Oh yeah! I almost forgot. I have a message for you, too. Thanks you.
[Namine fades.]

End Funny Quotes