“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)
“Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.”
Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Last update June 3, 2021.
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Milan Kundera 198
Czech author of Czech and French literature 1929–2023Related quotes
“My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world.”
Muhammad Ali
(1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist
This is actually from Ali's autobiography "The Greatest". However, this was said by Don King to George Foreman.
Misattributed
“For every ten jokes, thou hast got a hundred enemies.”
Book I, Ch. 12.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-1767)
“Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all.”
Muhammad Ali
(1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist
“Living is a pretty grim joke, but a joke just the same.”
L. Ron Hubbard
(1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology
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.
“He was saying that the end of the world wasn't an accident; it was a joke.”
Source: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
