In general, the straight line of a joke sets up a premise, an expectation. Then the funny ending - the punch line - in a sense contradicts the original assumption by refusing to follow what had seemed a reasonable train of thought. Many jokes involve that simple matter of leaping outside what had appeared to be the rules of the game at the moment.

Steve Allen

Categorized in : Moment Game Funny Simple

One of the nice things about problems is that a good many of them do not exist except in our imaginations.

Steve Allen

nice imagination positive

Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.

Steve Allen

mafia balance government

Thousands of years ago only Christ could walk on the water. Today anybody can do it; you just step on the garbage.

Steve Allen

today water years

Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations.

Steve Allen

laughter humanity thinking

Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless.

Steve Allen

radio mind television

Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.

Steve Allen

totalitarianism patriotism

In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist they be cheerleaders.

Steve Allen

president want teacher

Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences.

Steve Allen

destructive ideas religion

Religious believers of the world, you are free to continue to debate the simple, narrow question that divides you from atheists, but you have no right, in so doing, to treat the Humanists of the world with contempt. You owe them a deep debt of gratitude, for not only have they shed much light on a naturally dark world but they have very probably helped civilize your own specific religion.

Steve Allen

gratitude atheist religious

There is scarcely a page of the Bible on which an open mind does not perceive a contradiction, an unlikely story, an obvious error, an historical impossibility of one sort or another.

Steve Allen

errors religious bible

The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy - and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational

Steve Allen

religious philosophy commitment

Asthma doesn't seem to bother me any more unless I'm around cigars or dogs. The thing that would bother me most would be a dog smoking a cigar.

Steve Allen

dog smoking funny

If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow.

Steve Allen

punishment united-states people

I do not understand those who take little or no interest in the subject of religion. If religion embodies a truth, it is certainly the most important truth of human existence. If it is largely error, then it is one of monumentally tragic proportions—and should be vigorously opposed.

Steve Allen

errors important littles

Nothing is better than the unintended humor of reality.

Steve Allen

reality

...we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.

Steve Allen

assumption should religion

Everybody is somewhere.

Steve Allen

Laughter would appear to be a physical reflex, although even if it is, this still leaves unanswered the question of why the human response to humor is a convulsive spasm of the respiratory mechanism rather than a crossing of the eyes or a waving of the arms.

Steve Allen

arms laughter eye

Civilization itself . . . can easily be swept aside when mob passions are aroused.

Steve Allen

passion evil civilization

The fundamentalist believer is mostly a weird intellectual who often lacks real faith altogether. As a self-appointed attorney for God, who is in no need of attorneys, he very easily turns out to be more godless than the agnostic and the unbeliever. At all events, he seems deaf to poetry.

Steve Allen

intellectual real self