#Serious

"There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny."

"Humor can bring people under the tent. And a good joke can deflect some of the intensity surrounding a serious subject."

"I believe that an art exhibition can be engaging, fun and deeply intellectually satisfying and serious. These are not contradictory concepts in art."

"Jazz can be so serious, no sense of humor."

"Once you place that crown of liar on your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time."

"Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth."

"I find any sort of acting that doesn't have any humor in it is mind-numbingly boring."

"Insider trading is a serious crime. Do you know what the penalty for doing it is? Nothing, if you’re a member of Congress."

"A joke's a very serious thing."

"Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost."

"You can get through very serious and sometimes horrible and sometimes embarrassing and very awkward situations with humor. It gives us a way out."

"I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more."

"I've been encouraging documentary filmmakers to use more and more humor, and they're loath to do that because they think if it's a documentary it has to be deadly serious - it has to be like medicine that you're supposed to take. And I think it's what keeps the mass audience from going to documentaries."