We have a deep-rooted delight in the comic effect of words in English, and not just in advertising jingles but at the highest level of endeavor.
—BILL BRYSON, The Mother Tongue, 1990

Jubilance is an explanation for a lot of the things that happen in language.
—ALLEN WALKER READ, quoted in "At Play in the Language," by Michelle Stacy, The New Yorker, September 4, 1989

The deep and unconscious delight in language is one of the marks of difference between advantage and deprivation; the deprived child is deprived of joy.
—ANDREW WILKINSON, The Foundations of Language, 1971

Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language.
—ERIC RAYMOND, The New Hackers Dictionary, 1991

Everyone plays with language or responds to language play. Some take mild pleasure from it; others are totally obsessed by it; but no one can avoid it.
—DAVID CRYSTAL, Language Play, 1998

Comedy: The least controllable use of language and therefore the most threatening to people in power.
—JOHN RALSTON SAUL, The Doubter’s Companion, 1994

There’s a helluva distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
—DOROTHY PARKER, “Interview,” Writers at Work, 1958

Blows are sarcasms turned stupid: wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest.
—GEORGE ELIOT, Felix Holt, The Radical, 1866

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.
—LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH, Afterthoughts, 1931

Wit is educated insolence.
—ARISTOTLE, The Art of Rhetoric, 4th century B.C.

Jokes are grievances.
—MARSHALL MCLUHAN, “Speech to the American Booksellers Association,” June 7, 1969

Impropriety is the soul of wit.
—W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919

Finding the inappropriate word — the device upon which irony depends.
—JOHN CAREY, The Violent Effigy, 1973

We should begin by looking. And the place to begin is not in the stolid center but at the vibrant edges of language — among the bilingual, the flouters of convention, the daring, the young — not at the middle of the road, where all the traffic flows, but on the verge, where boundaries form and shift.
—RICHARD W. BAILEY, “Language at the Edges,” American Speech 75.4, Winter 2000

I would say that the dislike, the fear sometimes, of wordplay tells us a good deal, as do attitudes towards the human body, about puritanism. Of such sniffers at words, such misologists, we might say that their imaginations are nasty, British, and short.
—WALTER REDFERN, Puns, 1984

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
—GEORGE ELIOT, Daniel Deronda, 1876