James Thurber
James Thurber
James Grover Thurberwas an American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright, and celebrated wit. Thurber was best known for his cartoons and short stories, published mainly in The New Yorker magazine and collected in his numerous books. One of the most popular humorists of his time, Thurber celebrated the comic frustrations and eccentricities of ordinary people. In collaboration with his college friend Elliott Nugent, he wrote the Broadway comedy The Male Animal, later adapted into a film, which starred Henry Fonda and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth8 December 1894
CityColumbus, OH
CountryUnited States of America
We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
The things we laugh at are awful while they are going on, but get funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they've been through it too. The closest thing to humor is tragedy.
Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre.
Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.
My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
A peril of the night road is that flecks of dust and streaks of bug blood on the windshield look to me like old admirals in uniform, or crippled apple women, or the front edge of barges, and I whirl out of their way, thus going into ditches and fields and up on front lawns, endangering the life of authentic admirals and apple women who may be out on the roads for a breath of air before retiring.
A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.
I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.
A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.
Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen, and in which almost everything has.
I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.
I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?
We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll- em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms -hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.