Quotes & Sayings About Gallows Humor

I hope I died honorably. I have a great deal to atone for. - Eler Nersal — Lynda Williams

Men die. It's practically what they're for. — Catherynne M Valente

I'm a big fan of gallows humor. When my aunt passed away, she was in a coma for a day before my cousins pulled the plug. And the amount of joking and base humor that went on that day around her bed was so insane. It's crazy how people talk when something horrible is happening. — Amanda Peet

Gallows humor is part of having a doctor in the house. Deal with it. — J.R. Ward

I don't think you're dying," I said. "I think you've just got a touch of cancer.
He smiled. Gallows humor. — John Green

First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me. — Steve Martin

Funny stories on set - there are thousands of them, but they are only funny to the people who were on the movies. You start to have inside jokes and gallows humor. You have all kinds of things you laugh at, but as soon as you tell somebody, the joke falls flat because they don't know the context of it. — Bruce Campbell

Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift. — Milan Kundera

We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything. — Terry Pratchett

Life is warped. I'm just in sync. — Margaret Atwood

Fell?' he asked. 'Or was pushed?'

Anton shrugged again. 'It hardly makes a difference,' he said, 'when you are the man at the bottom of the stairs. — Michael Montoure

Often eating took considerable extra time, since he could hardly see his food, groping with a fork or spoon, enforcedly omnivorous. "Blind men wear spotted pants," Dorothy teased, telling him to wash his... — Edward Hoagland

It's very good of you
"
"No, no, not at all. It's my hobby. Not proposing to people, I don't mean, but investigating things. Well, cheer-frightfully-ho and all that. And I'll call again, if I may."
"I will give the footman orders to admit you," said the prisoner, gravely, "you will always find me at home. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I kept a picture of me kissing my dad's corpse on the forehead in my wallet for years. I'd break it out any time someone showed me a baby picture, just so they would know how it ends. — Doug Stanhope

I try to offset any tendency towards the macabre with humour. As I see it, this is a typically English form of humour. It's a piece with such jokes as the one about the man who was being led to the gallows to be hanged. He looked at the trap door in the gallows, which was flimsily constructed, and he asked in some alarm, 'I say, is that thing safe? — Alfred Hitchcock

The idea of being strong for someone else having never entered their heads, I find myself in the position of having to console them. Since I'm the person going in to be slaughtered, this is somewhat annoying. — Suzanne Collins

However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him - they would both be present at a celebratory dinner when they reached the roof, he reflected with a touch of gallows-humour, but the poodle would be in the pot. — J.G. Ballard

I hammered on the Poes' front door like Alaric on the gates of Rome. Poe said that a gaudy figure of speech was a silk cravat around a dirty neck. He didn't say whether the truth lay in the plain thing or in its fancy. — Norman Lock

I'd like a break. I'm forty-six, so the undertow is beginning to get to me."
"Then what are you good for?" she asked, in a kind tone.
"Oh, a man around the house has his uses. A dildo; an ear to talk to; two arms around you; a voice from the next room when you're lonesome."
"I have a dog to talk to."
"That might be a deal killer. — Edward Hoagland

God forbid I should bleed to death, eh? Then you'd have to cart around my rotting corpse. (Kyrian)
Could you be any more morbid? Jeez, who was your idol growing up? Boris Karloff? (Amanda)
Hannibal, actually. (Kyrian)
You're trying to scare me, aren't you? Well, it won't work. I grew up in a house with an angry poltergeist and two sisters who used to conjure demons just to fight them. Buster, I've seen it all and your gallows humor isn't working on me. (Amanda) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

We're suicidal, not innumerate. — Jasmine Warga

Was it tacky to get a cake during a hostage crisis? What was the protocol? She pictured chocolate frosting with white lettering: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HOPE YOUR DAUGHTER ISN'T DEAD. But this year was her fiftieth, a year with a zero. Veronica had to do something. So on her way to the condo she'd swung by a bakery and picked up a small German chocolate cake. It was her mom's favorite - or at least it had been, a decade ago. — Rob Thomas

Any port in a storm. — Michael J. Tougias

Comrades, we are going to try to cheer you up, and our sense of humor will help us in this endeavor, although the phrase gallows humor has never seemed so logical and appropriate. The external circumstances are exactly in our favor. We need only to take a look at the barbed wire fences, so high and full of electricity. Just like your expectations.
And then there are the watchtowers that monitor our every move. The guards have machine guns. But machine guns won't intimidate us, comrades. They just have barrels of guns, whereas we are going to have barrels of laughs.
You may be surprised at how upbeat and cheerful we are. Well, comrades, there are goods reasons for this. It's been a long time since we were in Berlin. But every time we appeared there, we felt very uneasy. We were afraid we'd get sent to the concentration camps. Now that fear is gone. We're already here. — Rudolph Herzog

One thing I would say is real cops have real gallows senses of humor and make incredibly funny and inappropriate jokes in the presence of dead people all the time. — Daniel J. Goor

New Orleanians knew how to turn deprivation into an asset; they had the best gallows humor going, they danced at funerals, they insisted on prevailing. — Tom Piazza

Live, die, something else lives. The very soil humanity walks upon is built up from death. Digging into a flowerbed means digging into bones. — M. Jones

You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"
"That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.
I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about. — Flann O'Brien

So this is it," said Arthur, "We are going to die."
"Yes," said Ford, "except ... no! Wait a minute!" He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur's line of vision. "What's this switch?" he cried.
"What? Where?" cried Arthur, twisting round.
"No, I was only fooling," said Ford, "we are going to die after all. — Douglas Adams

KitKat 13:18:45: Who would your ideal prince be? Your childhood friend, Prince Charming, or a strong warrior?

Gallows Humor 13:19:10: I don't want to know which Disney Princess I am. I've told you before, stop doing online quizzes. Leave it.

Gallows Humor 13:22:19: He would love me for myself.

KitKat 13:22:57: Tell me about your dress. — Lauren James

Nothing like an arcane literary debate with your tyrannical master while you pass the time leading to your execution. — Elizabeth Wein

So, you see, you will have to learn to listen to more of the radio music of life. It'll do you good. You are uncommonly poor in gifts, a poor blockhead, but by degrees you will come to grasp what is required of you. You have got to learn to laugh. That will be required of you. You must apprehend the humor of life, its gallows-humor. But of course you are ready for everything in the world except what will be required of you. You are ready to stab girls to death. You are ready to be executed with all solemnity. You would be ready, no doubt, to mortify and scourge yourself for centuries together. Wouldn't you? It is time to come to your senses...You are to live and to learn to laugh. You are to learn to listen to the cursed radio music of life and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at its distortions. So there you are. More will not be asked of you — Hermann Hesse

Why do you joke about such things?" she snapped.
He let his gaze land rather intently on hers. "When the alternative is despair, I generally prefer humor. Even if it is of the gallows variety. — Julia Quinn

The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure. — Sigmund Freud