Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter De Vries

De Vries draws a clean, cruel line between laughter as sport and laughter as execution. The verbs do the heavy lifting: the satirist "shoots to kill" while the humorist "brings his prey back alive". That single metaphor recasts comedy as a moral choice. One mode treats its target as a problem to be eliminated; the other treats a target as a person - foolish, yes, but recoverable. It is an argument about power: who gets mocked, how hard, and to what end.

The subtext is a warning aimed at writers who like to imagine themselves as harmless entertainers. Satire is not just "jokes with politics"; it's an intent to wound, to expose hypocrisy so thoroughly the subject can't stand back up. Its pleasure comes from finality. Humor, by contrast, values recurrence: the released prey gets "another chance", and so does the audience. De Vries is smuggling in a kind of civic ethic here, one that prefers the comic reset button to the satiric guillotine.

Context matters: De Vries wrote in a mid-century American landscape where satire was sharpening into a mass-market weapon - from magazine culture to the rising prestige of the takedown. His own fiction often skewered piety and pretension, but with a novelist's attention to human messiness rather than a pamphleteer's certainty. The line reads like a self-policing rule: if you want to be funny and truthful, aim carefully. Killing is easy; letting someone live with their flaws is the harder craft.