Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.
(George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. first published in the Saturday Review (Feb. 23, 1895). "An Old New Play and a New Old One," The Drama Observed , ed. Bernard F. Dukore, Penn State Press (1993).)
While it may not heighten our sympathy, wit widens our horizons by its flashes, revealing remote hidden affiliations and drawing laughter from far afield; humor, in contrast, strikes up fellow feeling, and though it does not leap so much across time and space, enriches our insight into the universal in familiar things, lending it a local habitation and a name.
When you think of the huge uninterrupted success of a book like Don Quixote, you're bound to realize that if humankind have not yet finished being revenged, by sheer laughter, for being let down in their greatest hope, it is because that hope was cherished so long and lay so deep!
(Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), French novelist and political writer. M. Olivier, in The Diary of a Country Priest, ch. 7 (1936).)
You highest men whom I have ever seen! This is my suspicion about you and my secret laughter: I guess that you would call my supermana devil!
(Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher, classical scholar, critic of culture. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 4, pp. 185-186, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin, de Gruyter (1980). Zarathustra, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Second Part, "On Human Prudence," (1883).)
Unfortunately the laughter of adults too often carries to the ears of the young the ring of ridicule, that annihilating enemy of human dignity. Like grownups, children enjoy participating in a joke and appreciate admiration of their wit and cleverness, but do not enjoy being the butt of the jokes
(Leontine Young (20th century), U.S. social worker and author. Life Among the Giants, ch. 12 (1965).)
If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy.
The childless experts on child raising also bring tears of laughter to my eyes when they say, "I love children because they're so honest." There is not an agent in the CIA or the KGB who knows how to conceal the theft of food, how to fake being asleep, or how to forge a parent's signature like a child.
(Bill Cosby (20th century), U.S. comedian. Fatherhood, ch. 5 (1986).)