Comedy, we may say, is society protecting i. - J. B. Priestley quotes fridge magnet, Black

Product Information

Our collection contains 30 quotes who is written / told by Priestley, under the main topics: Age - Humor. Furthermore, there are numerous phrases that are not capitalized that nevertheless seem special. At least, I cannot understand them, and have never seen them before, such as "real humour". A: Some of J.B. Priestley's achievements include writing successful novels, plays, essays, and founding the 1941 Committee to support the welfare state. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Priestley expects the reader to either have read Meredith’s essay (after all, why would someone be reading a biography of Meredith if they were not already familiar with his works?) or to take it on trust that his summary is accurate. The words that Priestley unexpectedly capitalizes—Humour, Irony, Comic Spirit and so on—are thus all taken directly from Meredith, who uses capitalization to indicate that he is personifying these abstractions as if they were characters in one of his novels. So when we look at a difficult bit in Priestley, for example: So often I dreamt of my lost, lost love with me, a bit of sleep heaven I ✨️ know can never again truly be. But that has kept me truly alive inside for so so long you see. Watermelon is a ubiquitous treat in childhood on hot summer days... The outer rind of the large oval fruit is redolent of the greenish shades of the sea, the white inner rind is like the sails, and the sweet red flesh echoes the tone of a boat's hull, as in the photo. I hope there is a way we will meet after this world, you l will seek before and after all, but now all we have is dreams of just that one day, when our love ruled us entirely, forever and past all. If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense (and it is the first condition of sanity to believe it), you will, when contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than the light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful; never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features are studied. […] Men’s future upon earth does not attract it [the Comic Spirit]; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning short sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually, or in the bulk—the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.

'_____, we may say, is society protecting itself – with a smile': J B Priestley

Just as this emoji expresses more than mere happiness – tears adding the ironic twist – smiles themselves convey so much more, too.’

That was the once when love was transcendent not a transaction, no no no, not at all. If we meet again we will smile, for this time there'd be nothing to stop us, together forever where there are no more falls. The Essay on the Idea of Comedy is an astonishingly brilliant performance, the best of its kind we have […] The Comic Spirit, then, unlike Humour, preserves its detachment, content to throw a beam of clear light on some incongruity. Its appeal is from common sense to common sense, from normality to normality, and it simply calls the attention to what Folly is serving up for it. It must always look on and can never associate itself with its object, except for the purpose of irony. Common sense, whatever its level may be, is clearly social sense, and its sword, the Comic Spirit, is drawn against whatever is anti-social. Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself—with a smile. The quote is not necessarily a statement of Priestley's own opinion on comedy, but rather seems to be his summary of his speculative interpretation of Meredith's supposed opinion of comedy. Furthermore, "comedy" here may not mean exactly what it means today: it is capitalized even when not at the beginning of a sentence, suggesting a special new sense, and it is contrasted with "Humour" (the British English spelling has two "U"s) also capitalized all the time, which supposedly is a different kind of funniness. There are numerous other terms with initial capitals, and I can't tell which are terms with special new meanings and which are not. For example, "Essay" is capitalized, but seems to just mean "essay", while "Humour", "Comedy", "Comic Spirit", "Comic Stage", "Irony", "Folly", and "Comic" seem to be capitalized to indicate that they mean something different from the uncapitalized versions of these terms. Before we could communicate verbally, we had to communicate with our faces,” Martinez says. “Which brings us to a very interesting, very fundamental question in science: where does language come from?” One of the hypotheses is that it evolved through the facial expression of emotion, he says. “First we learned to move our facial muscles – ‘I’m happy. I feel positive with you! I’m angry. I feel disgust.’” Then a grammar of facial expressions developed, and over time that evolved into what we call language. So when we wonder how something as complex as language evolved from nothingness, the answer is it almost certainly started with a smile.Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats. J. B. Priestley An absurd fashion of dress or speech or the like, seeking applause but finding itself ridiculed on the Comic Stage, perishes at a touch ; and if Meredith’s theory went no further than this, it would be true, but not exactly new. It is his larger claims that are too sweeping, particularly those he would make for the Comic Spirit informing his own work. During The Second World War he worked as a really efficiently radio host, as well as he had as much as 16 million audiences, just the Prime Minister Winston Churchill had extra. However after a couple of years the broadcasting was stopped because Churchill believed that Priestley was too leftist. This is another quote I have been thinking about for many years, and this one makes perfect sense to me, and it would seem to contradict Priestley's saying. The Orwell quote, if I understand it correctly, sees humor (comedy would be simply one type or use of humor) in the way Nietzsche saw what he called a "philosopher" (according to quotefancy.com): Note that "humorous" is not capitalized while "Humour" is, which suggests a cavalier disregard for consistent use of terminology. See how "Essay" is capitalized but seems to mean just "essay".