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.
Satire or sense, alas! Can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come;
Knock as you please, there's nobody at home.
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning.
Great wits and valours, like great states,
Do sometimes sink with their own weights.