A Quote by Neil Simon
All humor is based on hostility - that's why World War Two was funny.
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World War Two was a world war in space. It spread from Europe to Japan, to the Soviet Union, etc. World War Two was quite different from World War One which was geographically limited to Europe. But in the case of the Gulf War, we are dealing with a war which is extremely local in space, but global in time, since it is the first 'live' war.
The thing I have learned, especially in the Internet age, probably the easiest thing in the world is to declare that something is not funny. I mean it's not actually humor to say something is not funny, but it is viewed by a lot of people - and by that I mean mainly snarky young Internet men - as a kind of humor in and of itself is putting down other people's efforts at humor. And I don't care that much anymore about that because I know how easy that is to do.
It's just my natural way - to be funny. I don't know why that is. But as I've said, humor is a quick cover for shock, horror, confusion. The critics hate funny writers for the most part. They think funny is not serious, but I think that funny can be even more serious than nonfunny. And it can be more affecting, too.
I'm not offended. Lenny Bruce taught me that everything's funny. You can make everything funny. I don't think that assassinations are funny, I don't think you can make fun of ISIS, but almost everything is funny. And If we can't laugh at ourselves, who can we laugh at? So I don't mind ethnic humor. I like ethnic humor. I like dialect jokes. Laughter is a very subjective thing. If it's funny to you it's funny. And a lot of things are funny to me.
Teenagers falling off skateboards - funny. Nut shots - funny. Breaking wind - funny. The world cannot change those. Those three things are columns upon which humor is built.
There's a difference between a sense of humor and a sense of funny. A sense of humor is knowing what makes you laugh and a sense of funny is knowing what makes other people laugh. The journey of comedy, in a sense, is negotiating those two worlds.
Anxiety and hostility seem to be a great part of good and bad humor. Examining humor too closely does seem to destroy it.
In World War II the hostility and the exasperation resulting from the statification of the economy and the strain of the war have been directed as much against the government as against private capital.
Comedy is tragedy revisited or hostility. It is mock hostility, of course, or it would be ugly; we would have a war.
I remember reading in a comedy book very long ago when I first started, a person said there's a difference between a sense of humor and a sense of funny. A sense of humor is knowing what makes you laugh and a sense of funny is knowing what makes other people laugh. The journey of comedy, in a sense, is negotiating those two worlds.
I like dark humor. I think the world is very funny and tragic, and my photographs are basically dark Jewish humor.
Why do all these people want [comedians] to be serious? The reason they want that is these are people who aren't funny. Anybody funny can be serious, but people who have no sense of humor, they can never be funny - and frankly, they're jealous. There's very few comic actors. Think about it. There aren't that many. It's hard because you have to be able to do both.
When I was on an American show in 2015, I tried to talk about the threat Vladimir Putin posed to the free world. The interviewer said, "Wake me up when he takes over Poland." We heard something similar from years ago and we ended up with World War Two. Putin decided to skip Poland and went straight to Wisconsin. Putin is at war, a hybrid war, with the free world. His domestic propaganda is based entirely on a strong man challenging the free world. When the demonstrations around Russia began, the harsh response was because it was more important to show strength.
The post-Second World War simple system of social democracy and organized labour has fragmented massively, but just because people aren't organized in workplace trade unions doesn't mean they aren't in associations with other people - work-based, place-based, culture-based, sport-based, faith-based - there's a bit of an old rainbow coalition argument.
The problem is that we live in an uptight country. Why don't we just laugh at ourselves? We are funny. Gays are funny. Straights are funny. Women are funny. Men are funny. We are all funny, and we all do funny things. Let's laugh about it.
But if the two countries or governments are at war, the men of science are not. That would, indeed be a civil war of the worst description: we should rather, through the instrumentality of the men of science soften the asperities of national hostility. Davy's remarks to Thomas Poole on accepting Napoleon's prize for the best experiment on Galvanism.
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