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

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So Priestley’s claim in the passage quoted above is that Meredith’s thesis in the essay (whether he was conscious of it or not) is that comedy is a “social weapon”, that ridicules whatever is foolish, unusual, radical, queer, or otherwise anti-social, and in so doing defends the norms of the people that write it and the society they belong to. Priestley’s distillation of Meredith’s essay seems to be a fair summary of passages like the following:

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. 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. The father of modern plastic surgery, Harold Gillies, reported in 1934 that restoring the ability to smile made patients’ faces “feel much more comfortable”. In addition, Gillies observed, “The psychological effect is also one of considerable value.” On the interpretive side, Charles Darwin discusses the meaning and value of smiles in his 1872 landmark study The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Like many, Darwin sees a smile as the first part of a continuum.

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Just as this emoji expresses more than mere happiness – tears adding the ironic twist – smiles themselves convey so much more, too.’ A robust sense of humour is imperative for us to evolve into a self-confident, mature entity. The ability to look at the funnier side of life helps combat negative impulses. For this a certain amount of irreverence is required. To bring down the high and mighty to the level of the ordinary mortals through satire is an age-old practice. Though some place comedy on a par with sodomy as an unnatural act, one would rather go along with W. Somerset Maugham when he observes, "Impropriety is the soul of wit."

When Priestley was two decades old he enlisted in the British Army to combat in World War I, yet after having actually been wounded in fight hard in 1916 he abandoned a military career as well as focused instead on a profession as a journalist. Throughout the rest of his life he would certainly be a fantastic advocate for peace, something that also would certainly later on influence his writing. He was additionally a committed socialist and also it shows in his writing, not the very least in his plays. In 1929 came his development as an author with the unique "The Good Buddies" that made him popular even outside the UK. The Comic Spirit, then, unlike Humour, preserves its detachment, content to throw a beam of clear light on some incongruity. George Meredith (1877). ‘On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit’. In The New Quarterly Magazine (April 1877). Reprinted (1897) in An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, pp. 88–90. Westminster: Archibald Constable. It comes from memories of holding smiles with 💋 kisses, that we knew would be our last time together in this world after all, then our love together would be lost in life's fall. As a child, we lived for a time near the sea. I loved going to watch the boats with the tones of the sky and sea a silken glow.Fear takes an exposure time of 250 milliseconds to recognise – 25 times as long as a smile, “which makes absolutely no sense, evolutionarily speaking”, Martinez says. “Recognising fear is fundamental to survival, while a smile… But that’s how we are wired.” What I understand by “philosopher”: a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger. A: J.B. Priestley was married three times and had six children: four with his first wife Emily, and two with his second wife Jane. Most recently, line 6 read: "sliding sand-sleds down the dunes" and was replaced before cut-off time with: "sipping sunny afternoons" I'm in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn't have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it.

Scientists have shown that smiles are far easier to recognise than other expressions. What they don’t know is why. “We can do really well recognising smiles,” says Aleix Martinez, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University. “Why is that true? Nobody can answer that right now. We don’t know. We really do not know. We have a classical experiment, where we showed images of facial expressions to people, but we showed them very rapidly… 10 milliseconds, 20 milliseconds. I can show you an image for just 10 milliseconds and you can tell me it’s a smile. It does not work with any other expression.” Our love was so deep, deep as a trench in the ocean and we have given our hearts and our all but the world had other plans for us so we couldn't run away no not at all.https://docs.google.com/document/d/1upS2cyl2t_QryOAEWRqUiW2uuf_sU2ya-uLpdONUDNw/edit?pli=1#heading=h.c9t6hqhesh0c 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. 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". 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): 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.

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 meaning is obscured further by Priestley's statement that Meredith may be wrong, and maybe not as funny a writer as he thinks himself to be: I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning. J. B. Priestley A 2016 study published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior questioned thousands of people in 44 cultures about sets of photographs of eight faces – four smiling, four not. Most people deemed the smiling faces to be more honest than the non-smiling ones. This difference was huge in some countries, such as Switzerland, Australia and the Philippines, but small in others, such as Pakistan, Russia and France. In a few countries, such as Iran, India and Zimbabwe, there was no trustworthy benefit to smiling at all. The researchers concluded that where trust was low, smiling was less likely to influence the respondent. “Greater corruption levels decreased trust granted toward smiling individuals,” the authors concluded. If anything it could arouse suspicions. He observes his own infants closely, detecting in two their first smiles at six weeks, and earlier in the third. He comments how smiles do more than merely convey happiness, mentioning the “derisive or sardonic smile” and the “unnatural or false smile”, and showing photos to see if his associates can read what they mean.

There is exactly one smile in the Old Testament – Job, ironically, in the book of suffering – though in many passages faces are said to “shine”, which could mean smiling or could mean heavenly radiance. Eastern religions, however, often use the smile to denote enlightenment. The Buddha and various religious figures were depicted with serene smiles, though the original Buddhist texts are as devoid of smiling as scripture. Jesus weeps but never smiles. 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: Our collection contains 30 quotes who is written / told by Priestley, under the main topics: Age - Humor. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.