A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go. Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. What puts man in a higher state of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end. The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.
Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.
A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke. Scroll down for sources of quotations and special search engines.