Top 33 Humorists Quotes & Sayings

I'm a classic example of all humorists - only funny when I'm working.

Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.

Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.

It is the will of God that we must have critics and missionaries and congressmen and humorists, and we must bear the burden

Professional humorists and cartoonists have to go through a stage in which they have to kill their own internal editor just so they can get stuff out. So whether they believe it or not, they need me on the other end to do that editing for them.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

There aren't many political humorists. Dave Barry is excellent, but he doesn't do it much.

If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.

Perhaps we could do without tragedy in art - but what about comedy? Is it a coincidence that so many of the best American humorists have been Jewish and African-American?

Great humorists are great insulters.

All great humorists are sad... I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest - the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.

There are very few humorists who have written first-rate humor after they've become elderly.

Walking companions, like heroes, are difficult to pluck out of the crowd of acquaintances. Good dispositions, ready wit, friendly conversation serve well enough by the fireside but they prove insufficient in the field. For there you need transcendentalists-nothing less; you need poets, sages, humorists and natural philosophers.

There are people who can talk sensibly about a controversial issue; they're called humorists.

Six Secrets to Being a Successful Humorist 1. Be scared, unhappy, and an outcast as a kid. 2. Drop out of high school. 3. Spend time alone. 4. Don't take a comedy course. 5. Read other humorists but don't worship them. 6. Don't get your hopes up.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

Humorists are using Twitter to tell jokes in an interesting way. It doesn't have to be profound, and it doesn't have to be earth-shaking, but it is transformative.

This is not an easy time for humorists because the government is far funnier than we are.

Humorists of the 'mere' sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration.

Humorists are always pessimists. They're reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining.

Humorists always sit at the children's table.

City wits, country humorists.

Think of what would happen to us... if there were no humorists; life would be one long Congressional Record.

This is the big reason most humorists fail. Drunks don't read books.

I go in for what is known in the trade as 'light writing' and those who do that - humorists they are sometimes called - are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at.

Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious things.

I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.

I never asked to be compared to Richard Pryor. I just realised he was one of the greatest humorists we'd ever had on earth, I knew I wanted to be like that.

Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins.

Lampoon was exactly the opposite. The work was a lot of fun, but the office environment was hell. You cannot put 20 humorists together.

I think that all comics or humorists, or whatever we are, ask questions. That's what we're supposed to do. But I not only ask the questions, I offer solutions.

Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it or you don't. You can't attain it. There are terrible forms of professional humor, the humorists' humor. That can be awful. It depresses me because it is artificial. You can't always be humorous, but a professional humorist must. That is a sad phenomenon.