Quotes & Sayings About Serious Jokes

I like situational comedy when people are being completely serious and yet you can find something extremely funny, not jokes. — Bruce Robinson

Working with Chaplin was very amusing and strange. His films are so funny, but working with him, I found him to be a very serious man. Whereas the films of Hitchcock are macabre, he could be a very funny man to work with, always telling jokes and holding court. Of course, when I worked with Charlie he was getting older. — Tippi Hedren

The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979) — Jack McClelland

My locker room is serious. It is quiet. No one smiles. I don't like people telling jokes in my locker room. Now is not a time to tell jokes. From the minute we leave my hotel room, do not fuck around. The time for fucking around is over. Some serious shit is about to happen. — Ronda Rousey

You need to understand that some comedy can have consequences. — Auliq Ice

Jokes are another example of stupidity... we are so wise and so clever and we do stupid stuff, how wise is that?

Jokes on stage of being serious... when you aren't serious what you get is more likely somebody being in state of seriousness. — Deyth Banger

The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously. — Joseph Brodsky

A good team needs three things: the right people, the right spirit, and a couple inside jokes. — VanillaCreamPie8888

If you do something that is not gags and punchlines and is character-based, where there are no jokes as such, then it all has to come from a place of truth, and I love that - I love nothing more than getting very serious about my comedy. — Darren Boyd

I think I have a reputation for being really serious. In interviews I use big words, but I'm just an emotional goofball. I play practical jokes all the time. — Darren Hayes

Jokes aside, let us turn to serious matters. — Horace

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes. — C.S. Lewis

I just do little jokes all the time and people think I'm serious. I know exactly who Gordon Ramsay is, I know exactly who Gordon Brown is ... I just say jokes but they think I'm serious which I think is funny and I think I kind of play up the image sometimes because - whatever - it's just entertainment. — Paris Hilton

We are very serious so we can make very strong jokes. — Ernest Hemingway,

There were some particular themes that I knew I wanted to hit, and when I got deeper into the project I found that it was becoming serious in and on its own. By the end, it's not very funny at all. I think, now, that part of the power of the book is that the jokes are kind of sparkly distractions. — Moshe Kasher

I have this natural thing in my head that when I sit down to write something serious, I tend to make jokes. I can't help it. I can't help but desire for the narrative to be as complicated and as truthful as possible. That's just the way my head works. — Justin Simien

What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera's Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be, jokes and games and pleasure included; what's laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy. — Philip Roth

One of the great things about humor is, you can slip things past people with humor, you can use it as a sweetener. So you can actually tell them things, give them messages, get terribly, terribly serious and terribly, terribly dark, and because there are jokes in there, they'll go along with you, and they'll travel a lot further along with you than they would otherwise. — Neil Gaiman

The Australian sense of humor is very dry, sarcastic, and very undercover. Like if I tell any jokes in America, people just think I'm serious! So I just quit telling any jokes whatsoever. — Heath Ledger

I recently did the David Letterman Show about my book. He was very serious and made no jokes and it caught me off guard a little bit. He was much more serious than some of the joke shows that journalists get on. — Bob Woodward

She's different from the girls I'm used to dating. She doesn't get tired of my stories and jokes or expect me to start reading her mind. She doesn't want me to dress better or put highlights in my hair or serious up. I'm not a lifestyle accessory to her. I'm a necessity. I'm the guy that's going to crack open her cocoon. She doesn't need to change me - she needs me to change her. At least until her little butterfly wings get strong enough to fly away. — Tim Tharp

You used to have the jokes about never fixing the roof until it rained. People were undoubtedly the same now, or worse. They might well wait until something happened that forced them to act; that something would almost certainly be unpleasant - most likely, serious. Yet — George R. Stewart

It is when subjective consciousness maintains its independence of everything, that it says, 'It is I who through my educated thoughts can annul all determinations of right, morality, good, &c., because I am clearly master of them, and I know that if anything seems good to me I can easily subvert it, because things are only true to me in so far as they please me now.' This irony is thus only a trifling with everything, and it can transform all things into show: to this subjectivity nothing is any longer serious, for any seriousness which it has, immediately becomes dissipated again in jokes, and all noble or divine truth vanishes away or becomes mere triviality. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes. — Meghan Daum

And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don't already have one ... I'm out of here. — Kurt Vonnegut

Sure I do a lot of jokes about Anne Frank. But when you do those jokes, it makes people remember what happened to her. That process of bringing her story back doesn't have to be a serious one. What I say is all nonsense, but it helps to keep her memory alive. — Joan Rivers

I have been asked many times, Why do you laugh so much and make so many jokes? I become serious sometimes-when I have a stomachache! The Lord is all blissfulness. He is the reality behind all that exists. He is the goodness, the truth in everything. You are His incarnations. That is what is glorious. The nearer you are to Him, the less you will have occasions to cry or weep. The further we are from Him, the more will long faces come. The more we know of Him, the more misery vanishes. — Swami Vivekananda

Matter never makes jokes: it is always full of the tragically serious. Who dares to think that you can play with matter, that you can shape it for a joke, that the joke will not be built in, will not eat into it like fate, like destiny? Can you imagine the pain, the dull imprisoned suffering, hewn into the matter of that dummy which does not know why it must be what it is, why it must remain in that forcibly imposed form which is no more than a parody? Do you understand the power of form, of expression, of pretense, the arbitrary tyranny imposed on a helpless block, and ruling it like its own, tyrannical, despotic soul? — Bruno Schulz

Sure, but I think the traps should work." I set my hands on my hips, not wanting to tranquilize the bears unless absolutely necessary.

"The ketamine isn't just for the bears." Drew gave me a sympathetic look, then promptly turned and left, Roscoe on his heels.

"I think he expects me to use the ketamine on the film folks." I chuckled, knowing Drew wasn't serious. It was pretty darn close to a joke though. I was proud of my boss, he rarely made jokes.

"Or use it on each other." Cletus gulped the rest of his coffee, smacking his lips before adding. "If these movie people are as crazy as Drew thinks they are, we can self-medicate until we pass out. It's always good sense to have an escape plan. — Penny Reid

At the same time, if we were feeling a knot of guilt about our decision re: dying, it might have been because we regretted our failure to achieve a certain kind of wisdom born from certain kinds of life experiences...Our skittishness when it came to any crisis, the preference we had for deflecting important conversations with jokes, rather than facing them head-on. It was fine, we agreed, not to want to grow old. Fine, too, to take steps to ensure we didn't grow old. But we'd also avoided growing up. We'd lived our lives like perpetual children, hiding in corners, never knowing what to say, never knowing what to do. If our plan to die was problematic, it was problematic in that it eliminated the possibility of our ever becoming serious, capable women. — Judith Claire Mitchell

I am never serious, and therefore I have to make jokes do duty both for jest and earnest. — Franz Kafka

Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke. — Wislawa Szymborska

In real life I'm the type of girl who doesn't take herself too seriously. I'm very serious when it comes to work, but I like to make jokes and have a good laugh and make fun of myself. — Gal Gadot

He toyed with the idea of trying to be like the other boys. But he couldn't think of any jokes, and none of theirs seemed funny. Wherever their laughter came from, Ender couldn't find such a place in himself. He was afraid, and fear made him serious. — Orson Scott Card

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them. — Niels Bohr

For Uncle Giles had been relegated by most of the people who knew him at all well to that limbo where nothing is expected of a person, and where more than usually outrageous actions are approached, at least conversationally, as if they constituted a series of practical jokes, more or less enjoyable, according to where responsibility for clearing up matters might fall. The curious thing about persons regarding whom society has taken this largely self-defensive measure is that the existence of the individual himself reaches a pitch when nothing he does can ever be accepted as serious. — Anthony Powell

I'm pretty goofy and I make a lot of dumb jokes - life is too short to be serious, so I guess that's how I flirt. To be honest, I think I'm too shy and reserved to be a proper old fashioned flirt. — Cory Monteith

I can really stir up a conversation. Every time I go to a meeting or a casting, I try to make it as light and funny as I can. I'm always making really awkward jokes. You have to make life fun and not take it too seriously. I may look like I'm very serious and into my work, but if you knew me, I'm just a jokester. — Charlotte McKinney

I'm not gonna name names, but sometimes when reporters are talking, it gets a little boring because I don't have any jokes to tell because the questions are so serious. — Quvenzhane Wallis

Everybody that's living in this earth is living in a situation. It's not narrow-minded to the point where everybody is serious and nobody has a personality. I think people die telling jokes. — Mike Epps

I am fun. I do have a good time. I have a good heart. I'm not all jokes. I'm a pretty serious person sometimes. I'm very very hardworking. I'm very academic. — Heidi Montag

I've always been 'ethnic friend,' without any serious moments, all jokes. — Al Madrigal

Why this girl? Why had this girl crawled right under his skin and made an uncomfortable home there? Why did he want to make things good for her, to see her smile, to make her face
and her voice make all those interesting shapes and noises? Why did he want to stay up late with her when he knew she should be sleeping, just to hear her talk about maths and politics and the
state of the world?
This was not Quentin. Quentin did not like skinny girls. He didn't like serious girls. And he really hated bossy girls.
Quentin loved curvy, fun, uncomplicated girls; girls who laughed at his jokes and took off their bras when they danced on tables. If they wore bras at all. Yet here he was, washing up and mopping and feeling like five kinds of an arsehole over hurting the feelings of some skinny, serious, bossy girl. — Ros Baxter

All the jokes in my films, the comedy, they're not me, I just try to hold a big mirror up to us. — Yahoo Serious

When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems. — Marshall McLuhan

Most of the time, the songs have jokes in them, little sarcastic things, or purposely kitsch or something. So that's going along with a story, like I do in life, just talking to myself and making fun of stuff and laughing at stuff that's serious. And sometimes it's a good idea to put the laughing into the songs. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's all right just to be serious. But most of the songs have some kind of joke in them. — Paul Simon

Well, I am not always joking, sometimes I am serious. But some people always expect you to be funny. If you were like you are on stage, you would be obnoxious. With the jokes and the putdowns, I would need to take a break ... juggle something. — Dom Irrera

Marie-Laure sits in her customary spot in the corner of the kitchen, closest to the fireplace, and listens to the friends of Melanie Manec complain ... Nine of them sit around the square table, knees pressed to knees. Ration card restrictions, abysmal puddings, the deteriorating quality of fingernail varnish - these are crimes they feel in their souls. To hear so many of them in a room together confuses and excites Marie-Laure: they are giddy when they should be serious, somber after jokes; Madame Hebrard cries over the nonavailability of Demerara sugar, another woman's complaint about tobacco disintegrates mid sentence into hysterics about the phenomenal size of the perfumer's backside. They smell of stale bread, of stuffy living rooms crammed with dark titanic Breton furnishings. — Anthony Doerr

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Raphael continued to stare at me, in no hurry to get started. "You know the best way to get rid of a demon, right?" He asked with a serious face. I caught Ivy rolling her eyes as I shook my head.
"Exorcise alot!"
Ivy caught my expression of dismay. "It's okay, Beth. He's famous for his bad jokes. We're still waiting for him to grow up."
"And like Peter Pan, I hope to avoid that at all costs. — Alexandra Adornetto

Economy is not one of the necessary principles of the universe; it is one of the jokes which God indulges in precisely because he can afford it. If a man takes it seriously, however, he is doomed forever to a middle-income appreciation of the world. Indeed, only the very poor and the very rich are safe from its idolatry. The poor, because while they must take it seriously, they cannot possibly believe in it as a good, and the rich, because, though they may see it as a good, they cannot possibly take it seriously. For the one it is a bad joke, for the other a good one; but for both it is only part of the divine ludicrousness of creation - of the sensus lusus which lies at the heart of the matter. And that is why all men should hasten to become very poor or very rich - or both at once, like St. Paul, who had nothing and yet possessed all things. The world was made in sport, for sports; economy is worth only a smile. There are more serious things to laugh at. — Robert Farrar Capon