“Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”
"Some Remarks on Humor," preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941)
A very similar remark is often attributed to White, but may actually be a paraphrased version of the above statement: "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."
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E. B. White 54
American writer 1899–1985Related quotes
“Once you've dissected a joke, you're about where you are when you've dissected a frog. It's dead.”
Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984), p. 49; comparable to "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." — E. B. White, in "Some Remarks on Humor," preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941)
General sources
Source: 1930s, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), p. 406
“I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.”
"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"; first published as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in the New York Saturday Press, 18 November 1865; revised by the author and reprinted the following month in The Californian; first anthologized in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches http://books.google.com/books?id=kqMDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA17 (1867), ed. John Paul
“I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.”
"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865)
“We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.”
“An ideal world can definitely be created with a pure mind and optimistic results.”
Superheavy, 16 December 2013, Official website of ARRahman http://www.arrahman.com/superheavy.aspx,
