Absurdity Humor Quotes & Sayings

I sheep's idea of bravery : To become a wolf's pet. — Ljupka Cvetanova

. Despite the considerable horror they had felt when the SA men were bellowing crude anti-Semitic slogans, in retrospect the joke-tellers were very much aware of the boycott's inherent absurdity:
A city on the Rhine during the boycott: SA men stand in front of Jewish businesses and "warn" passers-by against entering them. Nonetheless, a woman tries to go into a knitting shop.
An SA man stops her and says, "Hey, you. Stay outside. That's a Jewish shop!"
"So?" replies the woman. "I'm Jewish myself."
The SA man pushes her back. "Anyone can say that! — Rudolph Herzog

- Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?
- I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent? — James Joyce

Suddenly he stopped as if rooted outside the doors of one house; before his eyes an inexplicable phenomenon occurred: a carriage stopped at the entrance; the door opened; a gentleman in a uniform jumped out, hunching over, and ran up the stairs. What was Kovalev's horror as well as amazement when he recognized him as his own nose! — Nikolai Gogol

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure. — George Carlin

The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five. — Carl Sagan

He tapped into the Zen of ignorance, the enlightenment of absurdity. — Christopher Moore

Paul grasped humor only imperfectly, but supposed he could see the absurdity of it from a human perspective. "Yes, and you are a very charming bipedal bladder of fluid," he said. "Nicest thing anyone's said to me all day! — Jim Cleaveland

Katie cleared her throat again. Then she looked into the window at her gums. She said, To change the subject, do you think I could tell if I had gingivitis? — M T Anderson

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

Life is sweet absurdity, Sir Wizard. Laugh your way through it. — Lita Burke

Things stayed peaceful in there, even as the crashing vehicles and the cries of the injured and dying reached a crescendo outside.
"I fry mine in butter!" indeed. — Kurt Vonnegut

[On Dr. Strangelove]: My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. [...] What could be more absurd than the very idea of two mega powers willing to wipe out all human life because of an accident, spiced up by political differences that will seem as meaningless to people a hundred years from now as the theological conflicts of the Middle Ages appear to us today? — Stanley Kubrick

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

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

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

The Law of Logical Insanity: Anything that can easily be explained using common sense and rational thought is probably too simplistic and therefore false and untrue. — Ian Strang

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

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

There is small merit in mocking goodness, tweaking charity; it is much more comic to deprive people of their petty little existence for no reason at all, for a lark. — Jacques Rigaut

The Law of Chaos: Any activity or event that seems to lie beyond the boundaries of possibility will usually be the first thing to occur. — Ian Strang

Reality was one step out of line, a cardigan with the buttons done up wrong. — Haruki Murakami

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

All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train. — Vladimir Nabokov

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

The Law of Moronic Ubiquity: Anything in the universe that is generally considered to be idiot-proof will eventually be ruined by an idiot. — Ian Strang

I can't go on, I'll go on. — Samuel Beckett

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

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

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

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