Humor & Life Quote by Norman Wisdom

There’s a small act of defiance tucked inside Wisdom’s plainspoken shrug. “I’ve always had a sense of humour” isn’t bragging; it’s a claim to continuity. In an industry that treats comedians like disposable products and aging like a punchline, he frames humor as a lifelong faculty, not a phase. The line “and I still do” does quiet work: it preempts the cultural suspicion that an old comic must be coasting on nostalgia, or that his relevance has expired. He’s not pleading for permission to stay onstage; he’s asserting competence.

The second half tightens into something almost stubbornly British: “I just want to go on performing as long as I can.” Want, not need. It positions performance as appetite, not therapy, not branding, not legacy management. That matters coming from Wisdom, whose persona often played the put-upon everyman - the underdog who absorbs indignity and keeps moving. Here, the underdog is time itself. “As long as I can” nods to mortality without dramatizing it; he won’t romanticize decline, but he won’t let it dictate his calendar either.

“It’s as simple as that” is the punchline, and the shield. Simplicity becomes strategy: refuse the grand narratives, the mythmaking, the think pieces about comedy’s purpose. Wisdom reduces career to craft and compulsion, puncturing the solemnity that often surrounds late-life artists. The subtext is clear: laughter is work, and work is how you stay alive.