The secret source of humor is not joy, but sorrow. 

-- Mark Twain 

The secret source of satire is not bemusement, but anger.

-- Barbara Ehrenreich 

Cars started flying and I was falling and saw the water. It seemed like a movie.

-- Catherine Yankelevich 

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse.

-- Al Gore 

There is increasing interaction between images and language. 

One might say that living in society today is almost like living in a vast comic strip.

-- from the Jean-Luc Godard movie 'Two or Three Things I Know About Her'

The new stuff built all over America in the late 20th century was analogous to the content of the television programming to which the lower classes insidiously became addicted - a cartoon simulacrum of a real world that was systematically being obliterated. Instead of a real countryside outside the hated cities, we now had suburbia, a cartoon of country living. Instead of towns, shopping malls. Eventually the theme park, as represented by developments of the Walt Disney corporation and their clones, became both the embodiment of the destruction wreaked across the land and paradoxically the last refuge from it. Americans would flock to Walt Disney World in Orlando to put themselves in a saccharine replica of the authentic Main Street environments that they had thoroughly trashed in their own home places.

--James Howard Kunstler, from "The Twilight of Mechanized Lumpenleisure"

If we weren't in Iraq, they would be using our relationship and friendship with Israel as a reason to recruit, the Crusades, or cartoons as a reason to commit murder. 

-- George W. Bush