Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.
Wit is the fetching of congruity out of incongruity.
Faith handles the ultimate incongruities of life, humor handles the more immediate ones.
Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
Incongruity, they say, is one of the main ingredients of humor. Maybe it's because everybody can feel superior to me. I honestly don't know.
Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.
Las vegas shouldn't exist. The incongruity hits you from the moment you first glimpse it from the airplane. First mountains, then desert, then neat squares of identical houses that look as if they were plucked straight from Monopoly.
In 'Hope Never Dies', Biden attempts to disguise himself with a beach look, hoping that the incongruity of it will allow him to snoop around Wilmington without being recognized. Obama, on the other hand, knows the best way to keep a low profile is to just be himself.
One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At 'The New Yorker', we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind - Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for communicating ideas. Not editorial comment, but observation.
I have a feeling that about 90% of my life has been shaped by my voice, both as an embarrassment and as an advantage. There was always the terrible incongruity of this deep voice barreling out of this little body. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that it was ludicrous, that it took on an importance that wasn't really there.