See Also: CHEERFULNESS, LAUGHTER

1. As merry as a grig —Frank Swinnerton
2. As merry as a mouse in malt —George Garrett
3. As merry as forty beggars —Proverb
4. As merry as notes in a tune —Dame Edith Sitwell
5. As merry as the day is long —William Shakespeare Shakespeare used this in both Much Ado About Nothing and The Life and Death of King John. In daily conversation, ‘cheerful’ is often substituted for ‘merry.’
6. Gay as the latest statistics on cancer or crime —Elyse Sommer
7. (Yours is) a spirit like a May-day song —Dorothy Parker
8. Blithe as the air is, and as free —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
9. Cavorted like a mule let out to pasture —Borden Deal
10. Feeling like Fourth of July —Stephen Vincent Benét
11. The gaiety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is a crime —Agnes Repplier
12. Gay as a funeral procession —Anon
13. As merry as a condemned man eating his last meal —Elyse Sommer
14. Gay as a honey-bee humming in June —Amy Lowell
15. Gay as a parade —Hilda Conklin
16. Gay as larks —Aesop The use of “gay as” and “merry as” comparisons to larks, crickets and just about any kind of humming or buzzing bird or insect abounds throughout the annals of literature as well as in daily speech.
17. Heart … lighter than a flower —Elinor Wylie
18. Making merry like grasshoppers —Robinson Jeffers
19. A man without mirth is like a wagon without springs, in which one is caused disagreeably to jolt by every pebble over which it turns —Henry Ward Beecher Were Beecher alive today he might substitute “A car without shock absorbers” for “A wagon without springs.”
20. (Everything went as) merrily as a marriage bell —W. Somerset Maugham
21. A merry heart does good like a medicine —The Holy Bible /Proverbs The word ‘doeth’ has been modernized to ‘does,’ and the simile is often shortened to “A merry heart is like medicine.”
22. Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a loom of clouds, and glitters for a moment —Joseph Addison