“The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”

“Be a clown, be a clown,
All the world loves a clown.
Act the fool, play the calf,
And you'll always have the last laugh.”

“No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable.”

“Joker, making clowns no longer objects to laugh at.”

“Whenever the circus would come to town, I would tell Ethan all kinds of kinky clown domination stories involving the leather clown, like the time she forced me to have sex with her in the little car, or the time she kept spraying me with the seltzer bottle until I obeyed her every command. Ethan and I would laugh and laugh at these tall tales, but I could tell deep down, he was wondering whether the leather clown was really real or not. And I would let him wonder.”

“Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.
He never saw Molly again.”

“When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.”

“Laugh at death and die of laughter.”

“Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not also the only one that deserves to be laughed at?”

“I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living, and I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the wisdom of foolishness, and become a laughing philosopher, feeling first life's tragedy and then life's comedy. For we must weep before we can laugh. Out of sadness comes the awakening, and out of the awakening comes the laughter of the philosopher, with kindliness and tolerance to boot.”