“They laughed much harder than the memory was funny because it felt good to laugh.”
Source: Enna Burning
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Shannon Hale 109
American fantasy novelist 1974Related quotes

A good Time going; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Everything is funny, if you can laugh at it.”
Variant: Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

"Charles Dickens" (1939)
Context: The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness of ‘having something to say’. He is always preaching a sermon, and that is the final secret of his inventiveness. For you can only create if you can care. Types like Squeers and Micawber could not have been produced by a hack writer looking for something to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is able to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and authority is always there to be laughed at.

“It's a good thing to be laughed at. It's better than to be ignored.”
In a handwritten note to the Postmaster General, who wanted to take action against "That Was The Week That Was", a satirical program.
Taken from letters-of-note.com http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/06/it-is-good-thing-to-be-laughed-at.html
1980s

“I was being chased by a giant crab. [Audience laughs] That's not funny.”
Harmful If Swallowed (2003)

Act V
1910s, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)
Source: The Doctor's Dilemma: A Tragedy