Ron Shock Quotes

I am a linear thinker in a lot of ways.

I have a very linear mind.

In my worldview, there are filers, and there are pilers. Filers think alphabetically. Pilers think geologically.

I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.

My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.

I sometimes use a girl singer the way Henny Youngman uses his violin - as a bridge between one laugh and the next.

In general, the straight line of a joke sets up a premise, an expectation. Then the funny ending - the punch line - in a sense contradicts the original assumption by refusing to follow what had seemed a reasonable train of thought. Many jokes involve that simple matter of leaping outside what had appeared to be the rules of the game at the moment.

The element of surprise - where you think you know where a joke is going, and then you're wrong. Those are my favorite kind of jokes.

Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.

I definitely have friends who gave me a tag for a joke I already had. Like, 'Here's another line.' A tag is, 'Oooooh, it's an industry term.' It's like, there's the punchline, and a tag is like a secondary punchline.

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION

It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.

I find you can often find humor just by turning something upside-down. Like a... small child.

Persons not habituated to reason often argue absurdly, because, from particular instances, they deduce general conclusions, and extend the result of their limited experience of individuals indiscriminately to whole classes.

A comedian is not a person who opens a funny door - he's the person who opens a door funny.

I'm fascinated by the logic that leads to something.

If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning.

The most important thing in comedy - apart from empathy, which I think is important even if disguised - is surprise. I like surprising people with the fact that something's even a joke at all.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

When you have answers, when everything has a reason, when it makes sense to an analytical person, you're going to be more successful. You're going to be more comfortable.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

Many people have the reasoning facility, but no one uses it in religious matters.