The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198602898 ISBN 13: 9780198602897

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2001

Synopsis

In The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, noted writer and satirist Ned Sherrin has gathered nearly 6,000 quotations drawn from an international cast of humorists and pundits, ranging from Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Oscar Wilde to Groucho Marx, Monty Python, and Roseanne. Forty themes, from computers to tennis, and over eight hundred quotations, are completely new to this edition.
Arranged in themes from Actors and Acting (including Dorothy Parker's famous barb on Katherine Hepburn's Broadway debut, "She ran the whole gamut of the emotions from A to B") to Youth (Georges Courteline, "It's better to waste one's youth than to do nothing with it at all"), Sherrin has collected the sharpest, the wittiest, the wryest in quips, put-downs, and one-liners. Here are the best lines of comedians and playwrights, novelists and producers, cartoonists and moguls, soldiers and lawyers. Readers will find Woody Allen ("I don't want to achieve immortality through my work...I want to achieve it by not dying"), Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Mae West, Will Rogers, and George Bernard Shaw--as well as literary wags from Kingsley Amis to Evelyn Waugh and Gore Vidal (on Eisenhower in 1964, "reading a speech with his usual sense of discovery"). Each quotation comes with details of who said it, where, and when, while separate keyword and author indices mean the reader will never have to wonder "whose line is it anyway?"
Displaying all shades of humor, from dry to sly, subtle to wacky, The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations will be the perfect resource for public speakers, writers and anyone else who enjoys a sparkling line, a clever pun, or a wickedly clever riposte.

About this title

Review

Some may search quotation compilations for wisdom or inspiration, but most crack these reference tomes looking for a laugh. Ned Sherrin has therefore done the world a favor by culling the witticisms and snide remarks from the vast quotation libraries, creating a volume completely dedicated to the funny remark. It's superbly browsable, but as the nearly 5,000 quotations are grouped by more than 100 themes, it's also a reference with practical applications. For a quip on consumerism, George Orwell comes through with, "Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket." Dean Martin opines about liquor: "You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on." Ronald Knox defines a baby as "a loud noise on one end and no sense of responsibility on the other," and for politics, Art Buchwald says of Richard Nixon, "I worship the quicksand he walks in." It's an irresistible dictionary. --Stephanie Gold

About the Author

Ned Sherrin is presenter of BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends, a weekly satirical round-up of international news. He was the producer and director of the ground-breaking television comedy show, That Was The Week That Was, and has written extensively for stage and screen.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0198602898
• ISBN 13: 9780198602897
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 576
• Editor: Sherrin Ned