Top 84 Humorist Quotes
#1. He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.
Paula McLain
#2. The humorist has a good eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint.
W. Somerset Maugham
#3. To imitate a lunkhead without malice or derision is quite a feat - and Red Skelton brings it off everytime. - Humorist Leo Rosten
Douglas Wissing
#4. I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I was not annoyed, for I am quite used to people not being amused at my jokes. I often think that the purest type of the artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests.
W. Somerset Maugham
#6. But I'm a humorist. I'm not a reporter, I never pretended to be a reporter.
David Sedaris
#7. 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."
Nick Offerman
#8. If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist-I feel like countering with the word seriousist.
Peter De Vries
#9. 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.
Jerome K. Jerome
#10. 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.
Nick Offerman
#11. 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.
Ambrose Bierce
#12. There is no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
Will Rogers
#14. Since much of American taxes prior to 1763 went to support the local clergy, one humorist suggested the opportunity to vote on that. If the minister was turned out, he could open a tavern and preach to his customers if he served them liquor.
Colin G. Calloway
#15. The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.
Peter De Vries
#16. Behind every humorist who delights in knifing hypocrites is a major self-critic.
Wendy Aron
#17. Someone who makes you laugh is a comedian. Someone who makes you think and then laugh is a humorist.
George Burns
#18. 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.
P. J. O'Rourke
#19. They were not in the least deterred when a celebrated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations proved that the world ended on December 31, 1999 - but that everyone had had too much of a hangover to notice.
Arthur C. Clarke
#20. 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.
Alan Coren
#21. 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.
Demetri Martin
#22. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#23. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#24. 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.
David Sedaris
#25. 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.
Mark Twain
#26. 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.
Bruce McCall
#27. To paraphrase the great humorist, Will Rogers . . . "We're all ignorant, but only on different subjects".
Wilson Casey
#28. A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.
Don Herold
#29. 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.
Dave Barry
#30. 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.
Johnny Carson
#31. To quote a noted Jewish humorist, Sholom Aleichem: "First comes health. You can always hang yourself later." As
Bel Kaufman
#32. Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
Ambrose Bierce
#33. The 'absurdities' of life can either turn you into a 'philosopher' or a 'humorist'..
Both 'opposing' poles of the same scale, a matter of understanding..
Ideal, if we can slide down the scale this way and that...
Read somewhere..Philosophers get heard, Humorists get paid..
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#34. What the fuck are you talking about?" I asked, wondering if I was in some crazy surrealist movie, wandering from telepathic sheriffs to homosexual assassins, to nympho lady Masons, to psychotic pirates, according to a script written in advance by two acid-heads and a Martian humorist.
Robert Shea
#35. A humorist is a writer who's not funny enough to call themselves a comedian.
Dan Alatorre
#36. 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.
Andy Rooney
#37. If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be
a Christian. Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain", American author and humorist
George Washington
#38. 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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#39. 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.
P. J. O'Rourke
#40. This is the funniest book I've ever held in my hands.
Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize winning humorist and author says about Radical Sabbatical
Dave Barry
#41. Unless a man is in part a humorist, he is only in part a man.
G.K. Chesterton
#42. If I get big laughs, I'm a comedian. If I get little laughs, I'm a humorist. If I get no laughs, I'm a singer.
George Burns
#43. God is a great humorist. He just has a slow audience to work with.
Garrison Keillor
#44. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#45. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#46. Beauty isn't worth thinking about. What's important is your mind. You don't want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head. - Garrison Keillor, American humorist
Habib Sadeghi
#47. I have the humorist Paul Krasner to thank for pointing out a big difference between George W. Bush and Hitler: Hitler was elected.
Kurt Vonnegut
#48. How will I be remembered? As a technician or artist? As a humorist or a visionary?
Norman Rockwell
#49. 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.
Ambrose Bierce
#50. 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."
William C. Brown
#51. When the public starts classifying you as thoughtful, someone given to serious issues, you find yourself declassified as a humorist.
Johnny Carson
#52. 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.
S.J Perelman
#53. I consider myself always a humorist. And I think anybody who tells jokes or makes people laugh is humor.
Dick Gregory
#54. As the tragic writer rids us of what is petty and ignoble in our nature, so also the humorist rids us of what is cautious, calculating, and priggish
about half of our social conscience, indeed. Both of them permit us, in blessed moments of revelation, to soar above the common level of our lives.
Robertson Davies
#55. To say that a humorist exaggerates to get big laughs, I don't see how that's big news.
David Sedaris
#56. A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.
P. J. O'Rourke
#57. I'm a Best-Selling author and humorist; my brother points out that a humorist is a writer who's not funny enough to call themselves a comedian. Gotta love family.
Dan Alatorre
#58. You've got to be (an) optimist to be a Democrat, and you've got to be a humorist to stay one
Will Rogers
#59. 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.
Leo Rosten
#60. Refuse to complain about your problems. Keep them to yourself. As speaker-humorist Ed Foreman says, "You should never share your problems with others because 80 percent of people don't care about them anyway, and the other 20 percent are kind of glad that you've got them in the first place.
Brian Tracy
#61. I am billed as a humorist, but of course I am a tragedian at heart.
Will Cuppy
#62. Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
William Zinsser
#64. Does your mind feel more and more like teflon? Nothing sticks to it?
Lily Tomlin
#65. Bungee jumping is like suicide with strings attached.
M.J. McGuire
#67. What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.
Dave Barry
#68. - You gave me a dead frog for my birthday!
- To remind you we all die and end up rotting underground eaten by maggots so we should enjoy our birthdays while we have them. I found it thoughtful.
Soman Chainani
#69. I recommend you don't attend the wheat and chaff bonfire.
M.J. McGuire
#70. Give a man a beer, the remote and a La-Z-Boy and he's a happy camper! All Things Caveman humor cartoon book will help you understand that hairy guy beside you.
Laurie Foxx
#71. To be reborned many times over, you must unleash the power of inertia. But must you go out every time and reach for your highest potential?
C.C. Wyatt
#72. Knowledge may be power, but half of what I know I wish I could forget.
Carroll Bryant
#73. Randy lay there like a slug. It was his only defense.
Jean Shepherd
#74. Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
Amy Tan
#75. A year ago I came here without a nickle in my pocket, now, I've got a nickle in my pocket.
Groucho Marx
#76. Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am.
David Sedaris
#77. How am I going to explain to my kids one day that I can't buy them a happy meal because the toy will make them fat?
Carroll Bryant
#78. I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.
Tom Lehrer
#79. The fool has said in his heart: pass me another Everlasting God-Stopper, please.
M.J. McGuire
#80. If you're too serious to make life a laughing matter, then you seriously need to make laughter matter to you today and every day!
Jeannine M. Luby
#81. I was a lazy reader as a kid. One nutrition label on a box of Cap'n Crunch and I'd have to take a nap.
M.J. McGuire
#82. I believe in love. Unfortunately, it doesn't believe me. Lust, on the other hand, is a nagging wife poking constantly at my DNA.
Carroll Bryant
#83. Humor is an absurd answer to a reasonable question.
Mark Bell
#84. The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't - whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
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