Quotes & Sayings About Jokes English

My English is closer to the literary English, and I'm not very familiar with jokes in English or with, you know, with small talk in English. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

The rain keeps up throughout the next day. "Lovely English summer we're having," everyone jokes. — Gayle Forman

I still feel threatened by academics, but my books have a lot of academic in-jokes and everybody assumes I went to university and studied English. — Jasper Fforde

It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I went to England to tell jokes, and I wanted to tell my Smokey the Bear joke, but I had to ask the English people if they knew who Smokey the Bear is. But they don't. In England, Smokey the Bear is not the forest-fire-prevention representative. They have Smackie the Frog. It's a lot like a bear, but it's a frog. And that's a better system, I think we should adopt it. Because bears can be mean, but frogs are always cool. Never has there been a frog hopping toward me and I thought, "Man, I better play dead!" — Mitch Hedberg

We can not blame Shakespeare for making use of cutthroats and villains in developing his plots, but we might have been spared the jokes which the jailors of Posthumus perpetrate when they come to lead him to the scaffold, and the ludicrous English of the clown who supplies Cleopatra with an asp. — William Shakespeare

I don't think you should make so many off-colour jokes about him becoming a cuckold. You're only getting away with it because he doesn't know what it means.' 'That's the beauty of the English language. One can wrap insults inside elegance, like popping anchovies into pastry. — Christopher Fowler

Nine out of ten English chefs have their names on their chests. Who do they think they are? They're dreamers. They're jokes. Just ask yourself how many chefs in this country have Michelin stars and how many have their names on their jackets. We all wear blue aprons in my kitchen because we're all commis. We're all still learning. — Marco Pierre White

Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [ ... ] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness - in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture. — George Eliot

You are not like other girls. You are not like other girls ("You are not like other girls," the boys you run with will tell you, and you will try not to let them see you preen under the glancing light of their approval). You learn their books and their language. You laugh at their jokes. You listen to their stories, sit blank-eyed on their couched while they play video games, pass them your English notes. You keep their secrets. You use the words they use about other girls in order to assure yourself that they will never use those words about you. You make yourself into nothingness, a ghost conjured into being only through the desires of boys, the rules of boys, the ideas of boys. You're not like other girls. — Sarah McCarry

There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny. — Tom Stoppard

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

In high school, we barely brushed against Ogden Nash, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, or any of the other so-unserious writers who delight everyone they touch. This was, after all, a very expensive and important school. Instead, I was force-fed a few of Shakespeare's Greatest Hits, although the English needed translation, the broad comedy and wrenching drama were lost, and none of the magnificently dirty jokes were ever explained. (Incidentally, Romeo and Juliet, fully appreciated, might be banned in some U.S. states.) This was the Concordance again, and little more. So we'd read all the lines aloud, resign ourselves to a ponderous struggle, and soon give up the plot completely. — Bob Harris