Brain Quote by Dick Cavett

Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common…

— Jim Holt

I have never examined the subject of humor until now. I am surprised to find how much ground it covers. I have got its…

— Mark Twain

“Is a joke truly funny when we laugh at it, or is it merely some aberration of our frontal lobe?”

— Gerald Schroeder

“In both jokes and dreams, Freud observed, meanings are condensed and displaced, things are represented indirectly or by their opposites, fallacious reasoning trumps logic.…

— Jim Holt

Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.

— Edward de Bono

Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex - and especially, it seems, jokes about…

— Joshua Foer

Humor is vague, runaway stuff that hisses around the fissures and crevices of the mind, like some sort of loose physic gas.

— Jonathan Miller

The subconscious mind has no sense of humor and people often joke themselves into unhappy experiences.

— Florence Scovel Shinn

“The common denominator of all jokes is a path of expectation that is diverted by an unexpected twist necessitating a complete reinterpretation of all…

— V.S. Ramachandran

I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility…

— Colson Whitehead

There are practical things which contribute to a joke's funniness. People will find a joke funnier if they are sitting closer together, if it's…

— Ben Miller

“Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes call “exformation,” which is a certain quantity…

— David Foster Wallace