Humor and Jokes, good, funny, entertaining, enjoyable, amusing, humorous, and hilarious literature by famous authors on English Culture blog by Carl William Brown.
To the theory of multiple intelligence, or of the seven intelligences of the American psychologist Howard Gardner, we should add a further one, namely the humorous intelligence, very particular and rare, in fact it is not present in very many individuals. So we will have, humorous/witty; linguistic/verbal; visual/spatial; intrapersonal; interpersonal; kinesthetics; logical/math; and finally musical intelligence.
Carl William Brown
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.
Lord Byron
I remain just one thing, and one thing only – and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.
Charlie Chaplin
Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke.
Hermann Hesse
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
Plato
The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic.
Søren Kierkegaard
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
Oscar Wilde
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
All human race would fain be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
Jonathan Swift
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
Isaac Asimov
Laughing faces do not mean that there is absence of sorrow! But it means that they have the ability to deal with it.
William Shakespeare
Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
William Hazlitt
All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.
Herman Hesse
I opened my eyes and saw the real world, and I began to laugh, and I haven’t stopped since.
Søren Kierkegaard
To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.
A. J. Ayer
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
Thomas Paine
Humour is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.
Edward De Bono
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
James Thurber
Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.There is always a laugh in the utterly familiar.
Max Eastman
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
Mark Twain
First of all, a joke can put things, definitions, ideas in a nutshell … Secondly, jokes can elucidate things, often more revealingly than long and complicated scientific definitions … A joke or anecdote can prick pomposity and show up cant and hypocrisy better than any other
method.
George Mikes
Or take the political joke – another case where the joke, while it must be funny in its own right, has a deeper, more significant meaning… Under oppressive regimes jokes replace the press, public debates, parliament and even private discussion – but they are better that any of these… The joke is a flash of lightning, athrust with a rapier. It does not put forward the “argument” that the tyrant is possibly mistaken: it makes a fool of him, pricks the pomposity, brings him down to a human level and proves that he is weak and will one day come crashing down. Every joke told weakens the tyrant, every laugh at his expense is a nail in his coffin. That is why tyrants and their henchmen cannot possibly have a sense of humour, any more than an archbishop can be an atheist or a monarch a republican. No one living in the free atmosphere of a western democracy can imagine the liberating and invigorating effect these jokes have as they spread from mouth to mouth.
George Mikes
We are hit by the joke but, as psychoanalysts put it, our ego regresses, gives up some control and for a moment relaxes its jealous, guarding position.
George Mikes
Understatement springs from the English character: and having become second nature it also contributes now to the formation or development of the English character. As I said, it is not only a joke, not always a joke and, occasionally, it is very much the opposite of a joke … The whole rhythm of life in England is understatement; their suppression of emotion is understatement; their underreaction to everything, the polite word instead of the expletive (when the latter would help so much more to clean the air), the stiff upper lip, the very climate with its absence of extremes, all these are understatement.
George Mikes
As Blake said the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, and humour without any doubt means indignation towards the follies of the world, sarcastic indignation against human vanity, his authority and his stupidity. We can also consider Humor as a form of revenge through which we can get even of the abuses supported without breaking the law. Humor, which is one of the highest activity of the human brain, as Freud said, is thus a means that helps us to live better and to endure our distressing reality.
As a matter of fact, it is a good therapy and a way of teaching us something through a lively approach. In ancient medical theory there were four principal “humours” in the human body (phlegm, blood, choler and black bile) and the bad balance of these elements caused illness, while an exact balance made a compound called “good humour”! In modern times, however the concept of humor has enlarged enormously and nowadays we talk about humor in literature as well as in everyday life to indicate not only a genre of writing but also a particular mood or character to face our existence and overcome the different anxieties of its burdens!
Humor is the feeling of the contrary, while the comic is the observation of it, said Pirandello in his essay on Humor, but nowadays we can consider humor as an hypernymic word that incorporates other styles and ways of oral and written expression such as comedy, satire or parody, and that makes use of all the linguistic and rhetorical devices of our tradition, such as irony, sarcasm, metaphors, puns and other tropes or schemes. In any case we associate humor with what makes us laugh or that evokes mirth, pleasure or strong as well as soft criticism towards the vices of the human kind.
Someone point out that humor is a nihilistic approach to life and that it tend to destroy and reject all established codes of values and morality, but this way to destroy is nothing but a way to create a new and healthier human behaviour, as Bacon or Eliot tought us!
Of course we have to understand the different ways of fantastical writing and thus we have also to come to terms with jokes production and nonsensical literature, but in the long run all this will help us to better appreciate the ineffectual, ridiculous, even comical, meaning of our existence and so at last we will learn to understand better also its final essence!
Some time ago Carl William Brown, that is yours truly or the writer of this short introduction if you prefer, completed his thesis on George Mikes and the Humor Phenomenology in the World of Literary and Philosophical Production, a huge and vast job of intellectual research through thousand of books and essays and that brought our author to read, amongst other things, obviously all the books written by George Mikes, to whom first of all go my affectionate regards!
This work constitutes the most detailed dissertation about George Mikes entire literary production and has also given a lot of ideas for Carl William Brown literary production itself as well as for the making of this humorous website, which is to consider as my highest tribute and homage to my teacher George Mikes.
We must add that the vast dissertation, for academical reasons, has been written half in Italian and half in English so the Publishing Editor who would be interested in it should do some light works of translation before having the pleasure to put on the market what is on of the best research on humor and on Mikes’ production in the world up to our days! But this is a pure digression! Anyway what is done is done and since we believe strongly in it, as J. Barrie put it, this must also be considered our religion, and not only another digression! What’s more this is also a study that teaches the ability to perceive, enjoy, or express what is amusing, comical, incongruous, or absurd in our life and so it helps to avoid some kind of bad accidents or to draw from Greek culture, some kind of Katastrophes!
A great author as Pirandello had also discovered that humor is born from the feeling of the contrary and writers like Mark Twain or J. Swift knew only too well that humor is born from pain and distress and that’s why it constitutes, as Freud put it, one of the most extraordinary psychic methodology to endure the painful events of our lives. therefore in these lines you can also find the real goal of this website!
We immediately underline however that for us true humor is always “black” and so in this sense it approaches necessarily the fiercest satire and the strongest jokes! We can also add that our humor is born from our deep, surrealist, nihilist and postmodernist nature and that the way to follow to fully appreciate our literary efforts is to live apart your “superego” moral controls in order to see some true and unfamiliar aspects of life, perhaps less conventional, but just for this reason more true!
To end this small introduction I want only to add some George Mikes’ remarks about humor and his surroundings, with the precise goal to pay my gratitude to this author who has made me discover the real value of a humorous lively disposition towards life and all its adversities! To really conclude this prologue I just want to point out that Carl William Brown in the meanwhile has become a full time writer and has produced something as 10,000 aphorisms and numerous essays about humor, power, literature, authority, stupidity, religion, politics, economics and psychology; not to talk of his jobs on the web, where he has created The Daimon Club Organisation which runs several websites and has had in two years more than 150,000 pages visited, even if it is not yet transalted in English! Now I have really concluded! For the time being, of course! See you soon then, and enjoy yourselves with my humorous creations and collections! Bye, Bye!
George Mikes was an Hungarian gentlemen who went to London for a fortnight on the eve of the second world war, as a journalist, and remained there for the rest of his life. The Hungarian subsequently referred to him as ” the chap who became an English writer “, where as the English have always known him as “the Hungarian”. This dual, or binary identity, led him to write a book entitled How to be an Alien which is an irrelevant study of English idiosyncracies. The book has been a great success, especially with the English themselves and so George during his life wrote also another 36 books, just to make a living and just to amuse and enjoy ourselves!
Who in this kind of merry fooling am nothing to you: so you may continue and laugh at nothing still. So said Prospero in the Tempest by W. Shakespeare and that’s why you perhaps are saying, a bit of light at last! But the sense of humor is a difficult question to treat, it is the feeling of contrary and opposing things, it is a sorrowful feeling born from life which must teach to die well in good health and merry laughing ! That’s why we must get used to death in life and life in death, in fact only doing like that we will be able to gain our everlasting eternity! Religion permitting ! Dont’ you think so!
And to confirm a very surrealistic mind, just listen to this amusing little poem of mine: ” Mr. Cook, Mr. James Cook, we suppose! Would you like to be cooked ? said the greedy cannibals of the Hawaii just before cooking the curious and tasty explorer, the famous and tender Captain Cook! Carl William Brown and the Daimon Club!
and now a nice joke:
” Smith meets his old friend Brown and tells him he has decided to get married:
” Who is the girl ?”
” Jane Huggins of Camberley ”
” Are you mad ? ” asks Brown astonished.
” Do you know her ?”
” I do know of her. And so does everybody else in the district. She has been in bed with half of Camberley.” Six months later they meet again and Smith tells his friend that he is married.
” Who is your wife ?”
” Jane Huggins of Camberley.”
” But how could you ?” exclaims Brown.
“Didn’t I tell you that every other man at Camberley had been in bed with her ?”
” Yes ” says Smith, ” but afterwards I went to Camberley and – well, it’s quite a small place.”
and don’t forget humor wisdom:
” But it does follow, that we must treasure our vices and be cautious with our good characteristics because one could not exist without the other. It does follow that judging yourself or others you must not think of separable mental ingredients, but of the mixture only.
Beware of kindness or rather do not trust it implicitly because in a bad mixture it may only cover a weakling and a liar.
Beware of too much sincerity and open heartedness; chatterboxes seem often very sincere.
Beware of promises; they are often given to please you to-day and not to be kept to-morrow.
Beware of fanatics: they are usually frustrated fools who do not even believe in their own doctrines.
Beware of too much chastity; because it is often practised and preached by people who would have liked to sin but could not. Do not turn your back on rude people without knowing a little more about them; they are often truthful and outspoken. Do not reject unkind people, just because they have the courage to say “no”.”
George Mikes
05-07-2023 World Laughter Day is an annual event celebrated worldwide to raise awareness about laughter and its many healing benefits, as well as about thousands of community groups around the world who regularly practice comedy that promote wellness and overall well-being. World Laughter Day is celebrated in most large cities around the world. Hundreds of people gather worldwide on that day to laugh together. It has been celebrated in Los Angeles since 2005 and has since spread all over the world as a way to express people’s love for comedy and laughter.
To make a good healthily laugh you can also visit the following pages!
Three men in a boat by Jerome K. Jerome
April fools day or All fools day
George Mikes e l’umorismo (My Ko-fi Shop)
For more information Visit www.daimon.org/hum