Humor e Ironia

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?

I have no respect for a man who can spell a word only one way.

[ To his wife Olivia, who had repeated his swearing :] You got the words right, Livy, but you don’t know the tune.

I never forget a face—but I’m going to make an exception in your case.

A lawyer one day spoke to him [Mark Twain] with his hands in his pockets. “Is it not a curious sight to see a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets?” remarked the humorist in his quiet drawl.

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.

Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

I’ve been around so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.

[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has leftentirely out of it the supremest of all hisdelights, the one ecstasy that stands first andforemost in the heart of every individual ofhis race—and of ours—sexual intercourse!It is as if a lost and perishing person in aroasting desert should be told by a rescuer hemight choose and have all longed for thingsbut one, and he should elect to leave outwater!

[ Question asked of losers on quiz show so that they would go away with some money :] Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

The two ladies [Dorothy Parker and Clare Boothe Luce] were trying to get out of a doorway at the same time. Clare drew back and cracked, “Age before beauty, Miss Parker.” As Dotty swept out, she turned to the other guests and said, “Pearls before swine.”

Twenty-four years ago I was strangely handsome; in San Francisco in the rainy season I was often mistaken for fair weather.

[ Responding to a woman contestant who, explaining why she had twenty-two children, said “because I love children, and I think that’s our purpose here on earth, and I love my husband” :] I love my cigar too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

If there were no husbands, who would look after our mistresses?

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is just too much fraternizing with the enemy.

The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself.

 

Ce Corps qui s’appellait, & qui s’appelle encor, le saint Empire Romain, n’était en aucune maniére, ni saint, ni Romain, ni Empire .

[ Her suggested epitaph for herself :] Excuse My Dust.

[ Explaining his resignation from the Hollywood chapter of the Friars Club :] I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.

[ Chicolini, played by Chico Marx, speaking :] Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we area nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.