This is the Truth! (1949)
Context: I guess the biggest joke of all was that story that got out about "Say it ain't so, Joe." Charley Owens of the Chicago Daily News was responsible for that, but there wasn't a bit of truth in it. It was supposed to have happened the day I was arrested in September of 1920, when I came out of the courtroom. There weren't any words passed between anybody except me and a deputy sheriff. When I came out of the building this deputy asked me where I was going, and I told him to the Southside. He asked me for a ride and we got in the car together and left. There was a big crowd hanging around the front of the building, but nobody else said anything to me. It just didn't happen, that's all. Charley Owens just made up a good story and wrote it. Oh, I would have said it ain't so, all right, just like I'm saying it now.
“Housekeeping ain't no joke.”
Source: Little Women (1868), Ch. 11 : Experiments
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Louisa May Alcott 174
American novelist 1832–1888Related quotes
Michael Specter, (April 8, 1993) "At Home With: Madeline Kahn; Funny? Yes, but Someone's Got to Be" http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE7D9153DF93BA35757C0A965958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1, The New York Times, The New York Times Company
“Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all.”
track 11, "Three Easy Payments"
Mitch All Together (2003)
“Living is a pretty grim joke, but a joke just the same.”
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.
“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)
“My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world.”
This is actually from Ali's autobiography "The Greatest". However, this was said by Don King to George Foreman.
Misattributed
“Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.”
Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting