H. L. Mencken Quotes

Laughter keeps you healthy. You can survive by seeing the humor in everything. Thumb your nose at sadness; turn the tables on tragedy. You can’t laugh and be angry, you can’t laugh and feel sad, you can’t laugh and feel envious.

If you can't laugh at yourself, life is going to seem a whole lot longer than you'd like.

The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.

I think there's nothing better than laughing in life, so that's nice, to be thought of as someone who can make someone laugh. It's 'cause I think life is hard. You know, my dad was a really silly man. A great Irish silly man. And that's fine.

Humor - I see it as a survival skill.

I tend to head for what's amusing because a lot of things aren't happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything.

Looking back, I remember my family laughing a lot. We were never the kind of people that dwelled on hard times. My family laughs when things are tough. Growing up like that, I got used to making jokes about things that were difficult. So when I started doing stand-up, that's what I went towards.

People find the humor in life all the time. And you have to in order to make it through real life. Like, some things are tragic, but you have to laugh.

You learn to laugh at yourself, and you also lean on comedy as a crutch to kind of take the edge off because comedians often are self-deprecating, and they cross lines that they shouldn't. Stuff like that brings a smile to my face every once in a while when needed.

Having a sense of humor about yourself is a sign of mental health.

You can find humor in most things, and even terrible things.

I think that doing comedy and playing Dwight is a service. Not to get grandiose about it, but I have a talent for playing oddball characters and I can make people laugh and that can help bring families together and people will really enjoy it and it puts a smile on their face and I think that is a really great thing.

Life is not a tragedy, it is a comedy. To be alive means to have a sense of humor.

Life is tough, and if we don't laugh, we're going to - our head will explode.

Life is hard. And we better laugh at everything, otherwise we're going down the tube.

Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.

A man must sometimes laugh at himself or go mad,’ said he. ‘Few realize it. That is why there are so many madmen in the world.

Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes the world feels all right and good and kind of like it's becoming nice again around you. And you realize it, and realize how happy you are in it, and you just gotta laugh.

The things we laugh at are awful while they are going on, but get funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they've been through it too. The closest thing to humor is tragedy.

... life is a comedy far darker than drama. It just takes time to learn what to smile at.

When we realize finally that we aren't God's given children, we'll understand satire. Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.

In real life, bad things happen and they're not funny, and then bad things happen and they can be funny. When you're unhappy you don't go an entire time without laughing. You don't go your whole life without laughing. It's just life.

We've got to laugh or break our hearts in this damnable world.

I feel like the only thing that I can do, and I've been fired from enough jobs, that I'm pretty confident in saying this, the only thing that I can do, even a little bit better than most people, is create that sort of that context with humor. And that's my way of not being helpless and not being hopeless.

It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard.