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10 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Jokes✕clear

Play · Comedy (play)

A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it.

William Shakespeare

Love's Labour's Lost · 1597

★ 5.5

Of all failures, to fail in a witticism is the worst, and the mishap is the more calamitous in a drawn-out and detailed one.

Walter Savage Landor

1825

★ 5.2

Novel

Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in-particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.

Kazuo Ishiguro

The Remains of the Day · 1989

★ 4.5

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie...A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

George Orwell

1941

★ 2.8

Essay

A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea.

George Orwell

1940

★ 2.0

Biography

I think no innocent species of wit or pleasantry should be suppressed; and that a good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.

Samuel Johnson

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D · 1784

★ 1.9

Essay

A pistol let off at the ear, not a feather to tickle the intellect.

Charles Lamb

1833

★ 1.9

Opera · Comedy

The world has joked incessantly for over fifty centuries. And every joke that's possible has long ago been made.

W.S. Gilbert

1894

★ 1.9

Poem

Why should truth not be impress'd Beneath the cover of a jest.

Horace

Satires · 34 BC

★ 1.3

Interview · Magazine

There's a helluva distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Dorothy Parker

1956

★ 1.0

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