Top 73 Humorist Quotes & Sayings

HUMORIST, n. A plague that would have softened down the hoar austerity of Pharaoh's heart and persuaded him to dismiss Israel with his best wishes, cat-quick.

I learned as a young man that I don't write jokes, but that I can deliver more mundane material and get a laugh. I call myself a humorist.

It's easy being a humorist when you've got the whole government working for you.

Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.

I consider myself always a humorist. And I think anybody who tells jokes or makes people laugh is humor.

I don't want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I've never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn't do it. A "smartcracker" they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

I am billed as a humorist, but of course I am a tragedian at heart.

God is a great humorist. He just has a slow audience to work with.

Humor is an escape, because you cannot think about your problems when you are trying to be funny; so, in essence, "being a humorist" gives you a valid excuse to hide from your pain.

I am a comedian but it's usually not a compliment to be called a prop comedian but I guess I sometimes use props. And I always confuse humorist with comedian. That's strange.

Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn't funny. It's a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it's not a surprise anymore.

A humorist has to be taken seriously before he's considered a real writer.

When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause.

The key, I would say to any fledgling humorist starting out, is to make sure that sloppiness is part of your recipe. That way they come to expect fumbling and clumsiness and they say, "Oh, it must be a charming part of his personality."

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

But I'm a humorist. I'm not a reporter, I never pretended to be a reporter.

PANTALOONS, n. A nether habiliment of the adult civilized male. The garment is tubular and unprovided with hinges at the points of flexion. Supposed to have been invented by a humorist. Called trousers by the enlightened and pants by the unworthy.

The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion.

How will I be remembered? As a technician or artist? As a humorist or a visionary?

A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.

But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

HOMŒOPATHIST, n. The humorist of the medical profession.

A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.

Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.

You've got to be (an) optimist to be a Democrat, and you've got to be a humorist to stay one

My mom is well read in English and Bengali, and my dad is a humorist, science writer and a futurist.

[Al] Franken is left-wing and funny. He's a pretty good political humorist.

Reactionary conservatives are smiling through the racial apocalypse. To them, race baiting is a joke, as 'humorist' Rush Limbaugh will tell you when he's calling Mexicans 'stupid.' Or it's a matter of semantics when they claim that Sonia Sotomayor is a 'racialist' which, far as I can tell, is the smooth jazz version of being a racist.

When the public starts classifying you as thoughtful, someone given to serious issues, you find yourself declassified as a humorist.

By his provocations to good-natured merriment, a humorist of the first water contributes as much to the sum of happiness as the gravest philosopher.

That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?

[ I'm] humorist, I guess. Or really more of a reporter. A reporter who reports on funny things.

In my more pompous moments I like to think of myself as a writer rather than a humorist, but I suppose that's merely the vanity of advancing age.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.

Nothing seems too high or low for the humorist; he is above honor, above faith, preserving sense in religion and sanity in life.

When a comic becomes enamored with his own views and foists them off on the public in a polemic way, he loses not only his sense of humor but his value as a humorist.

First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist.

One reason I didn't trust my writing for so long was that I always considered myself a serious dramatic actor. But people would always laugh when I shared my writing with them. It took my husband to help me see that I really am part humorist.

I've always been leery of comical artists because I think oftentimes they're hiding the fact that they're not that talented. For example, with Martin Kippenberger, I always thought he was a kind of poor man's Sigmar Polke - also a humorist - but Kippenberger used humor to get away with things he couldn't master.

I remember what J. Golden Kimball said when he came down to the stake where I was presiding. I introduced him as the 'Will Rogers' of the Church, and told the congregation that he was a great humorist. When he got up he said, 'You know, I think the Lord himself likes a joke. If he didn't, he wouldn't have made some of you folks!

And as Craig Brown - he's an English humorist, not a comedian but he's just a writer and humorist - I'm quite a fan of. I heard him talking in a rather similar way on the radio. He said I'm the sort of person - I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was rather interesting - he said I'm the sort of person that can be reduced to tears in an empty church and feel like I'm the CEO of the Devil's organization in a full one, and I tend to feel like that as well. I love empty churches and going into them looking around, but I'm not a churchgoer at all.

I'm not a comic. I'm a humorist.

Have I been an entertainer, a provocateur and a humorist? Absolutely.

If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist-I feel like countering with the word seriousist.

A humorist tells himself every morning, "I hope it's going to be a rough day." When things are going well, it's much harder to make the right jokes.

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 humorist has a good eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint.

I did not intend to write a funny book, at first. I did not know I was a humorist. I have never been sure about it. In the middle ages, I should probably have gone about preaching and got myself burnt or hanged.

One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas day. Don't clean it up too quickly." ~ (1919-), American writer, producer, humorist.

To say that a humorist exaggerates to get big laughs, I don't see how that's big news.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

I rejected the word humorist for a long time because I thought that it meant you had, like, a cardigan sweater with patches on the elbows, but now I'm old and I do. I grew into that word. I think at heart, all this time, I've been a diarist. I'm not ashamed of it.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

In Czechoslovakia, we consider Kafka a very funny man. A humorist.

I think that you are only obliged to be a humorist from the age of 18 until you turn 30. Past the age of 30 I don't think there is any obligation to be clever at all.

I've never made up events, but I've always been a big exaggerator. It's written on my humorist license that I'm allowed to do that.

It was a strange man, a kind of black humorist, a true philosopher. One day he said: "If my books could ensure an increase in the number of murders, well, it will mean that they have been quite useful in some way or another."