“The most fun you can have without laughing.”
I first stumbled across this line during a particularly rough stretch at work. A friend texted it to me completely out of context — no explanation, no emoji, just those twelve words. I stared at my phone for a full minute, genuinely unsure whether she was making a joke or a confession. Then I laughed, which felt like the first real laugh I’d had in days. That single line cracked something open in me, and I found myself thinking about it for weeks afterward. It seemed simultaneously too clever to be anonymous and too breezy to belong to any one person — which, as I eventually discovered, is exactly the point.
This quote has been floating around American culture for nearly a century. It has been pinned to comedians, film stars, Broadway legends, and sharp-tongued newspaper columnists. Yet nobody can claim it cleanly. The trail is winding, the attributions are contradictory, and the earliest printed version was actually a bowdlerized substitute for something far more direct. So let’s dig in. The Earliest Known Appearance The first documented print appearance of this expression traces back to January 1938. Walter Winchell, one of the most powerful and widely-read columnists in American history, dropped it into his Broadway gossip column with characteristic casualness. He wasn’t quoting anyone. He was simply defining a word: > The latest definition of necking: How you can have the most fun without laughing. Notice what Winchell did there. He applied the phrase to necking — a term that 1930s readers understood as a fairly innocent form of romantic physical contact. Researchers who have studied this expression closely believe Winchell almost certainly softened the original saying. The version circulating in conversation at the time almost certainly referred to sex directly. Newspapers simply couldn’t print that. So Winchell swapped in “necking” and let readers connect the dots. This kind of editorial bowdlerization was extremely common in that era. Winchell had a gift for capturing street-level wit and broadcasting it to millions. However, his version stripped the saying of its sharpest edge. Alfred Lunt Brings It to Broadway Just over a year later, the phrase surfaced in a completely different context. In February 1939, The Baltimore Sun ran a piece about legendary theatrical couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. The article described their grueling multi-city tour, during which they performed in city after city with barely a pause for rest. When a reporter asked why they didn’t simply slow down, Lunt delivered the line with theatrical flair: > “Yes, it is fun. Really, it’s the most fun you can have without laughing.” Here the phrase applied to the exhausting joy of live performance — not to romance at all. Lunt almost certainly borrowed the expression from existing slang rather than inventing it himself. His use of it suggests the saying already carried enough cultural weight that audiences would recognize the wink embedded in it. This moment matters. It shows the phrase already functioning as a repurposed expression — something you could lift from one context and drop into another for comic effect. That flexibility is exactly what gave it such a long life.
H. L. Mencken Preserves It in Print In 1942, the phrase received a kind of unofficial canonization. H. L. Mencken — journalist, cultural critic, and one of the most influential American intellectuals of the twentieth century — included a version of it in his massive reference work, A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources. Mencken listed it this way: > Love is the most fun you can have without laughing. > Author unidentified. That attribution — or rather, lack of attribution — is telling. Mencken was meticulous. He spent years tracking down the sources of sayings and proverbs. When he marked something “Author unidentified,” he genuinely couldn’t pin it down. That strongly suggests the phrase had already been circulating anonymously for years before anyone thought to write it down. Mencken’s version used the word “love” rather than “sex” or “necking.” Researchers believe this represents a slightly garbled version of the original, which most likely referred specifically to lovemaking. Additionally, the shift from “sex” to “love” softened the joke just enough to make it printable — and quotable — in a serious reference volume. Sarah Bernhardt Gets Credited — Dubiously Also in 1942, syndicated columnist E. V. Durling attributed the line to Sarah Bernhardt, the legendary French stage actress who had died nearly two decades earlier in 1923. Durling wrote: > “Love is the most fun you can have without laughing,” said Sarah Bernhardt. This attribution is almost certainly false. No earlier source connects Bernhardt to this phrase. Durling likely attached her famous name to give the quip more sparkle and authority. This kind of retroactive celebrity attribution was — and still is — extremely common with witty sayings. A clever line floats around anonymously, then someone decides it sounds like something a famous person would say, and the attribution sticks. Bernhardt did have a reputation for sharp, passionate statements about love and art. That reputation made her a convenient hook for the quote. However, convenience isn’t evidence. Colonel Stoopnagle and the Fractured Syntax One of the strangest chapters in this quote’s history involves Colonel Stoopnagle — the comic radio persona of Frederick Chase Taylor, who enjoyed enormous popularity in the 1930s. Columnist Jim Bishop referenced Stoopnagle twice in connection with this saying, first in 1964 and again in 1972. Bishop’s version of the Stoopnagle quote is wonderfully mangled: > Colonel Stoopnagle once defined sex as “the most fun without laughing there is of.” That fractured syntax — “there is of” — feels intentional. It reads like a comedian deliberately scrambling word order for comic effect. Whether Stoopnagle actually said it or whether Bishop invented the attribution is unclear. However, the version perfectly captures Stoopnagle’s known comedic style, which gives it at least some plausibility.
Leo Rosten, Evan Esar, and the 1960s Surge By the mid-1960s, the phrase had fully shed its newspaper-friendly disguise. Writers and speakers now used “sex” directly and without apology. In April 1967, author and humorist Leo Rosten deployed the line at a Book and Author Luncheon in Philadelphia. He used it as a mock book title: > “Sex Is the Most Fun You Can Have Without Laughing.” Rosten’s use was knowing and playful. He treated the phrase as already-familiar cultural shorthand — something his audience would immediately recognize. That’s a significant indicator of how widely the expression had spread by the late 1960s. Meanwhile, collector Evan Esar included a clean, unattributed version in his 1968 compendium 20,000 Quips and Quotes: > Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing. Esar’s book functioned as a kind of cultural filing cabinet for mid-century American wit. His decision to include the line without attribution confirms that no single author had successfully claimed it by that point. Woody Allen Immortalizes It on Film The single moment that cemented this phrase in popular consciousness came in 1977. Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman co-wrote the screenplay for Annie Hall, which went on to win four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Allen’s character Alvy Singer — lying in bed with Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall — delivers the line with perfect deadpan timing: > “That was the most fun I’ve ever had without laughing.” The line landed perfectly. It was self-deprecating, intimate, and funny without being crude. Millions of viewers heard it and assumed Allen had invented it on the spot. Many still do. However, Allen was clearly drawing on a phrase that had been circulating for nearly forty years at that point. His version added the personal pronoun — “I’ve ever had” — which made it feel confessional rather than aphoristic. That small shift transformed an anonymous proverb into a character moment. It’s a masterclass in how great writers absorb cultural material and make it feel entirely their own.
The Humphrey Bogart Attribution In 1983, a quotation book titled Was It Good for You, Too?: Quotations on Love and Sex attributed a version of the saying to Humphrey Bogart, who had died in 1957. The book presented it this way: > Nothing beats making love. It’s the most fun you can have without laughing. > — Humphrey Bogart This attribution has no supporting evidence. Like the Bernhardt attribution before it, this appears to be a case of a famous name lending credibility to an orphaned quote. Bogart’s tough-but-romantic screen persona made him a natural fit. Additionally, dead celebrities can’t deny saying things — which makes them convenient targets for misattribution. Why Does Misattribution Happen So Often? This quote’s history perfectly illustrates how anonymous sayings acquire celebrity owners over time. The process follows a recognizable pattern. First, a witty expression circulates orally among a specific subculture. Then, a journalist or columnist prints a sanitized version without attribution. Next, the phrase spreads through quotation books and newspaper columns. Finally, someone attaches a famous name — usually a deceased wit whose personality fits the sentiment. The famous name gives the quote authority. Meanwhile, the real origin — anonymous, collective, probably a little rude — quietly disappears. This pattern appears repeatedly across the history of popular quotations. Source Figures like Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, and Dorothy Parker attract enormous numbers of misattributed sayings for exactly this reason. The Quote’s Remarkable Flexibility One reason this particular saying has survived nearly ninety years is its structural versatility. The phrase works as a compliment, a confession, a punchline, and a philosophical observation — sometimes all at once. You can apply it to sex, to theater, to golf, to any activity that produces deep satisfaction without obvious hilarity. That flexibility is rare. Most jokes are context-dependent. This one travels. Additionally, the slight paradox embedded in it — fun and not laughing seem like contradictions — gives listeners a tiny puzzle to solve. The moment they resolve it, they feel clever. That feeling is deeply pleasurable, which is probably why people keep repeating the line. What We Can Conclude The honest answer to “who said it first” is: we don’t know. The expression almost certainly originated as anonymous slang, probably in the 1930s or earlier. Walter Winchell printed a cleaned-up version in January 1938 — that’s the earliest documented appearance. Alfred Lunt, H. L. Mencken, and E. V. Durling all helped spread it during the 1940s. Leo Rosten and Evan Esar carried it into the late 1960s. Woody Allen gave it its most famous moment in 1977. Neither Sarah Bernhardt nor Humphrey Bogart said it. H. L. Mencken collected it but didn’t coin it. Woody Allen popularized it but didn’t invent it. The real author is the same anonymous wit who has been responsible for half the best lines in the English language — and who never gets credit for any of them. Sometimes the most honest attribution is the simplest one: source unknown. That doesn’t make the line any less true. If anything, it makes it more so — because it means enough people recognized the truth in it to keep passing it along, generation after generation, without needing a famous name attached to make it worth repeating.