George Carlin Laughing Quotations

I've been a performer for a long time and I know when people are laughing from their guts, from the inside, and when their tuxedos are laughing.

But when you're in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you're guiding the whole being for the moment. No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That's when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow.

I enjoy watching a woman with really bad teeth and a good sense of humor struggling to use her lips and tongue to hide her teeth when she's laughing. I just stand there and tell her joke after joke after joke.

Suppose I could shoot myself in the mouth, but what if I miss? People will laugh at me.

Without the laughs, the audience wouldn't be there at all, so in that sense, yes, I am a comedian.

And, of course, the funniest food: "kumquats". I don't even bring them home anymore. I sit there laughing and they go to waste.

No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open.

Primitive societies, or social groupings, had shamans, and some of them even more recent in time. Shamans were tricksters. There was a tradition of the trickster, and the trickster was a clown, a humorous fellow. His task was to trick the gods, to humor the gods into laughing, so that there was access to the divine - because laughter is a moment when we are completely ourselves.

No one is more himself than the moment when he's laughing at a joke. It's at those moments that people's defenses go down, and that's when you can slip in a good idea.