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

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Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around." Leo Buscaglia on Smile

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1upS2cyl2t_QryOAEWRqUiW2uuf_sU2ya-uLpdONUDNw/edit?pli=1#heading=h.c9t6hqhesh0c The quotation is from Priestley’s biography of the novelist and poet George Meredith (1828–1909), in a passage summarizing Meredith’s ‘On the Idea of Comedy’ (1877): Orwell and Priestley knew each other and Orwell denounced the latter as being pro-communist which makes me wonder whether one quote was explicitly designed to undermine or contradict the other, and which came first. I wonder whether Priestley and Orwell had an argument about what humor or comedy was, spawning both the quotes at more or less the same time.

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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.”

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: 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. 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.

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If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it. Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile. More Quotes from J. B. Priestley:A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours. A: J.B. Priestley rejected a knighthood in 1965 due to his opposition to the British honours system and his political beliefs. 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".

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 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. 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. 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.Thus, Irony is treated as if it were something more than a mode of expression and, as such, one of the instruments of the Comic Spirit. Incidentally, it is too often assumed that Meredith, in this Essay, is describing the spirit in which his own work is conceived and not discussing a literary form. In places he is, but actually his own work far transcends the limits imposed by him upon the creator of pure Comedy. (Richmond Roy, for example, is a humorous creation.) The Comic Spirit, then, unlike Humour, preserves its detachment, content to throw a beam of clear light on some incongruity. 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. Most recently, line 6 read: "sliding sand-sleds down the dunes" and was replaced before cut-off time with: "sipping sunny afternoons"