Charlotte Cripps (January 31, 2007) "Stand up and be counted, comedians", The Independent.
Sphinx Society lecture, Brown University, April 3, 2003 (as reported in the Brown Daily Herald
"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.
1997 speech at University of Virginia Law School, as quoted in Marc Galanter, Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture (2006), p. 3.
Books, articles, and speeches
“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”
