What Others Have to Say On Humor...

This post has been a long time in getting itself pulled together and is likely to need some editing and massage to fully bloom, but it has been too long, so in it comes!

Humor--yes, that is what most of us mean when we say "comedy," though some few of these actually do refer to the dramatic form; see if you can distinguish which is which:

"Comedy is tragedy plus time." --Carol Burnett

"Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people." --Angela Carter in Wise Children

"When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful." --Francois Truffant [And this is why The Daily Show is so resonant--at least for me.]

"The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape." --Thornton Wilder

"Though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve." --Wm. Shakespeare

"Comedy comes from conflict, from hatred." --Warren Mitchell

"In comedy, reconcilement with life comes at the point when to the tragic sense only an inalienable difference or dissention with life appears." --Constance Rourke

"Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." --Charlie Chaplin

"Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair, a narrow escape into faith." --Christopher Fry

Do you have a favorite quote on humor or comedy?