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
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.
In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn.
History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business.
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
If you wonder which is the stronger sex, watch which one twists the other around her little finger.
Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight.
Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.
The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.
I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.
So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.
Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.
Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other