I'm not a comic. I'm a humorist.

A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.

In Czechoslovakia, we consider Kafka a very funny man. A humorist.

A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.

Have I been an entertainer, a provocateur and a humorist? Absolutely.

A humorist has to be taken seriously before he's considered a real writer.

But I'm a humorist. I'm not a reporter, I never pretended to be a reporter.

It's easy being a humorist when you've got the whole government working for you.

To say that a humorist exaggerates to get big laughs, I don't see how that's big news.

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn't funny. It's a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it's not a surprise anymore.

That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?

Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

One reason I didn't trust my writing for so long was that I always considered myself a serious dramatic actor. But people would always laugh when I shared my writing with them. It took my husband to help me see that I really am part humorist.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

Reactionary conservatives are smiling through the racial apocalypse. To them, race baiting is a joke, as 'humorist' Rush Limbaugh will tell you when he's calling Mexicans 'stupid.' Or it's a matter of semantics when they claim that Sonia Sotomayor is a 'racialist' which, far as I can tell, is the smooth jazz version of being a racist.

I'm essentially a humorist and, I think, a pretty good one. I've known all along that 'My Friend Dahmer' is the one book I'll be most known for, and in a way, that's a drag, as it's nothing like the rest of the work I've done or will do moving forward. But the way I figure, it's better to have a best-known work than not to have one at all.

Share This Page