If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.

So when all the yielding and objections is over, the other Senator said, "I object to the remarks of a professional joker being put into the Congressional Record." Taking a dig at me, see? They didn't want any outside fellow contributing. Well, he had me wrong. Compared to them I'm an amateur, and the thing about my jokes is that they don't hurt anybody. You can say they're not funny or they're terrible or they're good or whatever it is, but they don't do no harm. But with Congress — every time they make a joke it's a law. And every time they make a law it's a joke.

Imagine if Congress were actually knowledgeable of American history.

Imagine what life would be like without imagination! There would be no Michelangelo or Da Vinci, no Edison, no delinquents and no saints, no Mozart, no nuclear power.

Satire in the US has been killed off by the twin tyrannies of political correctness and affirmative action.

The whole nation hitherto has been void of wit and humour, and even incapable of relishing it.

...American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

We need to protect these national treasures called our comedians because life needs them. We need to stop binding them in [and] fencing them in,

The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.

What the country needs is a good big laugh. ... If someone could get off a good joke every ten days, I think our troubles would be over.