The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

If this humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain.

You find out in life that people really like you funny. So what do you give 'em? Humor. And then if you show them the other side, they don't like you as much. I find, too, that I can hide behind the idiot's mask being funny, and you never see the sorrow or the pain.

It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.