Humor
Denning is an inveterate punster who frequently uses humor to get points across. Examples:
- April Fool special section (when he was editor), ACM Communications (April 1984).
- On Active and Passive Writing, a treatise exhorting students to write in the active voice.
- A Tale of Two Islands. Fable about a controversy in queueing theory over operational analysis. First published in 1991. Contained as an appendix to a 2006 overview of operational analysis
Read more about this topic: Peter J. Denning
Famous quotes containing the word humor:
“All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.”
—Lenny Bruce (1925–1966)
“Carlyle’s humor is vigorous and titanic, and has more sense in it than the sober philosophy of many another. It is not to be disposed of by laughter and smiles merely; it gets to be too serious for that: only they may laugh who are not hit by it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)