See Also: CLEVERNESS, LAUGHTER

1. Funny as a crutch —American colloquialism

   This typifies the ironic simile that says one thing while it means quite the opposite. A variation that takes the irony an extra step: “Funny as a rubber crutch.”

2. Funny as a dirty joke at a funeral —William Mcllvanney
3. Funny as your own funeral —Anon
4. Good jests bite like lambs, not like dogs —Thomas Fuller
5. Humor … like good cheese, mellowed and ripened by age —Dorothy Canfield Fisher
6. Humor, like history … repeats itself like a Gila monster —Harold Adams
7. Jokes that weren’t proper and which therefore went through me like an electric shock, both pleasant and intolerable —Thomas Keneally
8. Like clothes for the needy, they [jokes] were worn, shabby and used —Henry Van Dyke
9. Sarcasm should not be like a saw, but a sword; it should cut, and not mangle —Lord Francis Jeffrey
10. A sarcastic wit is a kind of human pole-cat —Josh Billings

    In Billings’ phonetic dialect this reads: “a sarkastic wit iz a kind ov human pole-cat.”

11. They [poorly told jokes] just lie where they fall, plop, like dropped jellyfish —Herman Wouk
12. True sacrcasm is like a swordstick; it appears, at first sight, to be much more innocent than it really is, till, all of a sudden, there leaps something out of it, sharp and deadly and incisive, which makes you tremble and recoil —Sydney Smith
13. Wheezing out great lumps of irony like a cat spitting up fur —Wilfrid Sheed