A sense of humor is a serious business; and it isn't funny, not having one. Watch the humorless closely: the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter. The humorless can programme themselves to relish situations of human farce or slapstick — and that's about it. They are handicapped in the head, or mentally 'challenged', as Americans say (euphemism itself being a denial of humour). The trouble is that the challenge wins, every time, hands down. The humorless have no idea what is going on and can't make sense of anything at all.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humour.

There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.

The people who fear humour — and they are many — are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.

People trying to be funny are never as funny as people trying to be serious and failing.

...without intelligence, there can be no humour.

If one has no sense of humor, one is in trouble.

By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.

There are times for all of us when all the laughter seems to be gone, but we should not permit these periods to last too long. When we've lost our sense of humor, there isn't very much left. We become ridiculous. We must then go to war against the whole world, and that's a war we cannot win.

If there’s one thing extreme god-botherers of every stripe have in common, it’s that they don’t have any sense of humor at all where their beliefs are concerned.

Why, without a sense of humour, you are blind to so much in the world. To human nature. To the absurdity of so much that we say and do.

Crowd men have no sense of humor. It is very difficult to educate solemn and opinionated people.

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.