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.
“Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.”
“Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all.”
Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000), p. 313
“Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”
Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 97
Context: You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
“Yes, maybe it’s just one colossal big joke with no point to it.”
Lazarus stood up and stretched and scratched his ribs. “But I can tell you this, Andy, whatever the answers are, here’s one monkey that’s going to keep on climbing, and looking around him to see what he can see, as long as the tree holds out.”
Methuselah’s Children (p. 667; closing words)
Short fiction, The Past Through Tomorrow (1967)
“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)
