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As Blake said the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, and humour without any doubt means indignation towards the follies of the world, sarcastic indignation against human vanity, his authority and his stupidity. We can also consider Humor as a form of revenge through which we can get even of the abuses supported without breaking the law. Humor, which is one of the highest activity of the human brain, as Freud sais, is thus a means that helps us to live better and to endure our distressing reality. As a matter of fact, it is a good therapy and a way of teaching us something through a lively approach.

In ancient medical theory there were four principal "humours" in the human body (phlegm, blood, choler and black bile) and the bad balance of these elements caused illness, while an exact balance made a compound called "good humour"! In modern times, however the concept of humor has enlarged enormously and nowadays we talk about humor in literature as well as in everyday life to indicate not only a genre of writing but also a particular mood or character to face our existence and overcome the different anxieties of its burdens!

Humor is the feeling of the contrary, while the comic is the observation of it, said Pirandello in his essay on Humor, but nowadays we can consider humor as an hypernymic word that incorporates other styles and ways of oral and written expression such as comedy, satire or parody, and that makes use of all the linguistic and rhetorical devices of our tradition, such as irony, sarcasm, metaphors, puns and other tropes or schemes. In any case we associate humor with what makes us laugh or that evokes mirth, pleasure or strong as well as soft criticism towards the vices of the human kind.

Someone point out that humor is a nihilistic approach to life and that it tend to destroy and reject all established codes of values and morality, but this way to destroy is nothing but a way to create a new and healthier human behaviour, as Bacone or Eliot tought us! Of course we have to understand the different ways of fantastical writing and thus we have also to come to terms with jokes production and nonsensical literature, but in the long run all this will help us to better appreciate the ineffectual, ridiculous, even comical, meaning of our existence and so at last we will learn to understand better also its final essence!

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it. Lenny Bruce

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away. English Proverb

He that seeks trouble never misses. English Proverb

Fools are my theme, let satire be my song. Lord Byron

The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.
Italo Calvino

What arouses the indignation of the honest satirist is not, unless the man is a prig, the fact that people in positions of power or influence behave idiotically, or even that they behave wickedly. It is that they conspire successfully to impose upon the public a picture of themselves as so very sagacious, honest and well-intentioned. Claud Cockburn

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection. Frank Moore Colby

I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomised our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me. Charles Dickens

Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love. William Hazlitt

It is difficult not to write satire. Juvenal

Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will, but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God. Or else, hatred against the bogged-down vileness of average man as against the possible heights that humanity might attain. Paul Klee

It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him. G. C. Lichtenberg

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it. Jonathan Swift

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little—or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives. Anthony Trollope

Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized. Mark Twain

Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one’s own cherished beliefs. Gore Vidal

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