A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance — you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
--
"The State of the Theatre" an interview by Henry Brandon in Harpers 221 (November 1960)Arthur Miller
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Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism.
Thomas Mann
The humanities are despised because they are dangerous. They arm us with the intellectual weapons we need to fight the forces of ignorance and idiocracy, and to free ourselves from freedumb.
Laura Penny
"In the end, we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke. The soul is its punchline."
Tom Robbins
“Is this the conduct of a ‘sly and unpredictable villain’?”
“Decidedly so, if the villain, for the purposes of his joke, thinks to simulate the altruist.”
“Then how will you know villain from altruist?”
Cugel shrugged. “It is not an important distinction.”Jack Vance
Irony is jesting hidden behind gravity. Humor is gravity concealed behind the jest.
John Weiss
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