Wit's an unruly engine, wildly striking
Sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer.
Funny Quotes
Funny is a tone rather than a subject, and the older writers do better in it than you might expect. Shakespeare has the most entries, followed by Alexander Pope, with Swift, Thomas Fuller and Will Rogers not far behind. Some of the oldest jokes here are still the best: the critic John Dennis, quoted in a magazine in 1781, said that a man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.
There is also some more recent material. Jon Stewart’s remark about comedy being tragedy plus time, from The Daily Show in 1999, is here with its language intact. Two lines are flagged as misattributed: Pope’s couplet about knocking on a head with nobody at home, and the one about jesters proving prophets, credited to Joseph Addison.
Generosity without delicacy, like wit without judgment, generally brings as much pain as pleasure.
A good comedian can say things funny and other guys just say funny things.
A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.
Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.
Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.
'Thou canst not joke an Enemy into a Friend; but thou may'st a Friend into an Enemy.
Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth.
The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.
The law of levity is allowed to supersede the law of gravity.
A bitter jest, when it comes too near the truth, leaves a sharp sting behind it.
In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.