Quotes about humor

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.

“Answer the gentleman, Thomas—don’t be afraid.”

Tom still hung fire.

“Now I know you’ll tell me,” said the lady. “The names of the first two disciples were—”

“David and Goliah!”

Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene.

Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.

They spell it "Vinci" and pronounce it "Vinchy". Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

Inside the family room, Arthur Herk was methodically, relentlessly changing channels. He was doing this partly because the instinct to change channels is embedded deep in the male genetic code, and partly because he knew his wife and stepdaughter hated it. (Chapter 2)

• Florida’s government is divided into three branches: the executive, the judicial and the criminal.

There comes a time in a man’s life when a man must man up and be a man by summoning up his manhood and doing something manly.

Miami turned out to be a great market: It seemed as if everybody here wanted things that went bang. You had your professional drug-cartel muscle people, who needed guns that shot thousands of rounds per minute to compensate for the fact that their aim was terrible. You had your basic local criminals, who wanted guns that would scare the hell out of civilians; and your civilians, trying to keep up with your local criminals. You had your hunters, who, to judge from the rifles they bought, were after deer that traveled inside armored personnel carriers. You had your "collectors" and your "enthusiasts," who lived in three-thousand-dollar trailers furnished with seven-thousand-dollar grenade launchers. You had an endless stream of shady characters representing a bewildering variety of revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, counter-counterrevolutionary and counter-counter-counterrevolutionary movements all over the Caribbean and Central and South America, who almost always wanted guns on credit. (Chapter 5)

Suddenly, I noticed something: my wallet and keys are exactly where I left them. So either the spirits decided not to move them or—we cannot rule this out – they moved them and then moved them back.

Experiences like that led the band to develop the Retaliation Song. The way it worked was, if they were forced to perform a song they hated, they'd retaliate by playing a song that was even worse. For example, if the band had to play "My Way," it would counterattack with Bobby Goldsboro's sap-oozing piece of dreck, "Honey" (She wrecked the car and she was sad, and so afraid that I'd be mad, but what the heck!). One night, at a wedding reception, an extremely drunk man ordered the band to perform "The Ballad of the Green Berets," and then, a half hour later, demanded that it be played again. That night, Arrival struck back with the hydrogen bomb of retaliation songs: "In the Year 2525," the relentlessly ugly Zager and Evans song with the disturbingly weird lyrics (You won't find a thing to chew! Nobody's gonna look at you!). Some guests actually fled the room. (Chapter 3)

The main reason why Deeber's car ignition had never been wired to a bomb is that reporters have poor do-it-yourself skills. (Chapter 1)