"What a Joke" Radio Show (2019)
“Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all.”
“Living is a pretty grim joke, but a joke just the same.”
A letter to his wife Polly (October 1938) http://bernie.cncfamily.com/sc/excalibur.htm, quoted in Bare-faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (1987), p. 81 http://www.discord.org/~lippard/bfm/bfm05.htm#81.
Context: Living is a pretty grim joke, but a joke just the same. The entire function of man is to survive. The outermost limit of endeavour is creative work. Anything less is too close to simple survival until death happens along. So I am engaged in striving to maintain equilibrium sufficient to at least realize survival in a way to astound the gods. I turned the thing up so it's up to me to survive in a big way... Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed.
“My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.”
Act II
Source: 1900s, John Bull's Other Island (1907)
“My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world.”
This is actually from Ali's autobiography "The Greatest". However, this was said by Don King to George Foreman.
Misattributed
“It's not just a miracle; it's a miracle with chocolate. Best kind.”
Source: Kiss of Death
“Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.”
Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious.”
The Abolition of Work (1985)
Context: These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.
“You are a miracle, and everything you touch could be a miracle.”
Episode of the National Public Radio program Speaking of Faith : "Brother Thay: A Radio Pilgrimage with Thich Nhat Hanh" (2003)
