Stephen Colbert on laughter

Winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Give a man a sub-prime fish loan and you’re in business, buddy.

We claim no respectability. There’s no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don’t have to defend anything.

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Mark Twain1835–1910“The Chronicle of Young Satan” (ca. 1897–1900, unfinished), published posthumously in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (1969), ed. William Merriam Gibson (pp. 165–166 in the 2005 paperback printing, )

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.

Victor Hugo1802–1885

You can’t deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

Stephen Kingborn 1947