Absurdity Humor Quotes

“CALVIN:
Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor?
When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny.
Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?
HOBBES:
I suppose if we couldn't laugh at the things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.”

— Bill Watterson

“The combination of landing the biggest interview of my career and having a drill in my back reminds me that God only gives us what we can handle and that it helps to have a good sense of humor when we run smack into the absurdity of life.”

— Robin Roberts

“I just try to write what I think would really happen, and with grief and tragedy, there are these naturally occurring moments of levity and humor and absurdity. I think that's what life is really like. Sadness gets interrupted, and happiness gets interrupted.”

— Kaui Hart Hemmings

“I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life's essential absurdity.”

— Stephen King

“It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself.”

— Stephen King

“All I try to do is as earnestly and as acutely as I can, conceive a character and try to portray this character just honestly. If the humor is within the absurdity and the awfulness of situations, then let it be seen that way.”

— Patrick Warburton

“I can't imagine a life without humor. Especially if you have an existential understanding of life, you must acknowledge the absurdity of it all.”

— David Cronenberg

“I always cast people with a sense of humor because people that are super serious don't understand when I ask them to eat a booger it's not necessarily about that. It's about something more. It's about inviting a little bit of absurdity into the process and humanity into the process. Making sure that no matter who we are and what sort of pedestal or glamorous lighting we're under, we're all eating boogers man.”

— David Gordon Green

“Humor helps us get through life with a modicum of grace. It offers one of the few benign ways of coping with the absurdity of it all.”

— Diane Keaton

“In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.”

— Anthony Marra

“The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.”

— Jane Hirshfield

“What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.”

— Clifton Fadiman