Stop Me If You've Heard This Quotes

“In both jokes and dreams, Freud observed, meanings are condensed and displaced, things are represented indirectly or by their opposites, fallacious reasoning trumps logic. Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common origin in the unconscious. Both are essentially means of outwitting our inner "censor.”
― Jim Holt, Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes

“The total absence of humor from the Bible,” Alfred North Whitehead once observed, “is one of the most singular things in all literature.”
― Jim Holt, Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes

“It was in the early Renaissance that the art of the joke was reborn, and the midwife was a man called Poggio.”
― Jim Holt, Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes

“And, perplexingly, recent research by the psychologist Peter Derks shows that what makes people laugh hardest is not the cleverness of the joke but the speed with which they get the punch line.”
― Jim Holt, Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes