If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you
Not documented in Shaw — an unsourced saying pinned on him after his deathUnknownEarliest known appearance 1951 · originator undetermined
?Attribution status: Disputed: no Shaw source, first credited to him posthumously, true originator unknown.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
No play, preface, essay or letter by George Bernard Shaw is known to contain the line. Its earliest known appearances date to 1951; the earliest precisely dated is critic Cecile Starr’s film column in the Saturday Review of 13 October 1951, which credited Shaw — nearly a year after Shaw had died — and Quote Investigator ↗ reaches no conclusion about who actually coined it.
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you” Disputed. This line has never been found in George Bernard Shaw's published works. Its earliest documented appearances are from 1951; the earliest precisely dated is critic Cecile Starr's Saturday Review column of 13 October 1951, which credited Shaw nearly a year after his death; Quote Investigator reaches no conclusion about who actually coined it, and Wikiquote lists it as Disputed. — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to George Bernard Shaw. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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In context
Evoking the themes of truth, courage and wisdom. Theme: "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
What the record actually shows
The popular line
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
In Shaw’s works
Not found. No play, preface, essay or letter by Shaw is known to contain it.
Earliest known appearance
1951. The earliest precisely dated instance is the film column by critic Cecile Starr, The Saturday Review, 13 October 1951 — credited to Shaw, who had died on 2 November 1950. Barry Popik also logs an undated 1951 Films in Review printing that may be earlier.
Nearest genuine Shaw line
John Bull’s Other Island (first performed 1904)
NORA (blushing with delight). You’re joking, Mr Keegan: I’m sure yar. KEEGAN. My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.
Real Shaw — but not the source
This is the closest thing in Shaw’s own writing, spoken by Father Keegan in Act II of John Bull’s Other Island and verifiable in the Project Gutenberg text ↗. It is a different sentence with a different meaning, offered by Wikiquote ↗ only as a possible ancestor of the popular saying — not as its source. No excerpt of the popular line from Shaw exists, because no Shaw text containing it has ever been found.
1951 — the first credit, and it is posthumous.Quote Investigator ↗ dates the earliest appearance to October 1951, in a Saturday Review film column by critic Cecile Starr, who credited Shaw. Shaw had died on 2 November 1950, so the attribution begins nearly a year after he could confirm or deny it.
Wikiquote files it as Disputed.The Shaw page ↗ lists the line under its “Disputed” heading — not among the sourced quotations — notes it was credited to Shaw in the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, and records that variants are also pinned on W. C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin and Oscar Wilde.
An independent researcher finds nothing earlier. Etymologist Barry Popik’s file ↗ also documents nothing before 1951: his citation list opens with Films in Review, Volume 2, page 3 and Saturday Review, Volume 34, page 60, both 1951. His own contribution to the relay is the note that Billy Wilder “is often credited, since the 1980s, for borrowing from Shaw.” (The “disputed” label and the John Bull’s Other Island ancestry that also appear on his page are reproduced there under a Wikiquote heading, so they are not a second, independent judgement.)
The real Shaw sentiment is a different sentence. QI records a May 1909 Harper’s Monthly article whose author reports Shaw remarking that Mark Twain “is in much the same position as myself: he has to put matters in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking” — the same idea, demonstrably not the same words ↗.
No rights status can be asserted for this wording, because no work containing it has ever been identified. It is not traceable to any Shaw text, and the earliest known printing is a 1951 magazine column that was itself quoting the line as something already in circulation. Shaw’s own works quoted here for comparison — John Bull’s Other Island, first performed in 1904 — are distributed by Project Gutenberg ↗ as public domain in the USA; that status covers the Keegan passage above, not the disputed saying.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
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Fact-check
Everyone who has been handed this line
Because the saying spread by word of mouth among performers, it has been re-credited roughly once a decade. Quote Investigator ↗ tracks the whole relay, and every name below shows up after the 1951 Shaw attribution, not before it.
✕
Since 1951George Bernard Shaw the popular credit
The first name attached, in an October 1951 Saturday Review film column by critic Cecile Starr — but Shaw had died on 2 November 1950, and QI finds no substantive support ↗ for it in anything he wrote.
✕
2008 onwardOscar Wilde chronologically impossible
QI states plainly: “QI has found no substantive support for crediting Oscar Wilde with the saying. He died in 1900 and the expression appeared decades afterwards.” See the citation list ↗, where the Wilde credit first surfaces in a 2008 newspaper horoscope column.
✕
1980s onwardBilly Wilder repeater, not author
Wilder was present at a 1986 ceremony where the saying was quoted with Shaw named as its originator, and Popik notes he has been “often credited, since the 1980s” ↗ for the variant “be funny or they’ll kill you.” Dustin Hoffman passed the Wilder version along again in 2013.
✕
2003 onwardCharles Ludlam born too late
The Ridiculous Theatrical Company founder used a version of the line, and a 2003 newspaper piece credited it to him — but QI points out ↗ that “Charles Ludlam was born in 1943 which was too late to coin the expression by 1951.”
~
1976–1977Richard Pryor and James L. Brooks quoted it unattributed
Pryor in a 1976 Cleveland Plain Dealer piece and Brooks in a 1977 Palm Beach Post piece both used the saying without naming a source, which helped detach it from Shaw and let later writers re-assign it. Both are in QI’s citation trail ↗.
The saying is a comedian’s working principle, so it travels through people who make their living on stage and screen rather than through books — and each retelling reshapes the wording. Quote Investigator’s citation trail runs from 1951 to 2013 with almost no two versions alike: you’d better make them laugh, make ’em laugh, you’d better be funny, be funny or they’ll kill you. The smooth modern form on greeting cards and social media is the end of that process, not the beginning of it.
Shaw is a plausible-sounding host because the sentiment really is his. QI records a 1909 Harper’s Monthly item ↗ in which Shaw, talking about Mark Twain, says a satirist must “make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking.” That is the same thought — but it is not this sentence, and the gap between the two is where the misattribution lives.
Shaw died in November 1950. The first person known to put these words in his mouth did so the following year.
The older ancestors QI turns up
Quote Investigator’s citation list starts long before Shaw was ever credited. It records an 1882 Edinburgh Review item on forgiving a lashing “if you can make them laugh,” and an 1887 collection of Henry Ward Beecher’s pulpit sayings: “Men will let you abuse them if only you will make them laugh.” The idea that humour buys a speaker immunity is old and communal, which is one reason no single author can be pinned to the modern phrasing.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1856–1950 · Irish playwright, critic & polemicist · Nobel Prize in Literature, 1925
Shaw was born in Portobello, Dublin on 26 July 1856 and died at Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire on 2 November 1950. He wrote more than sixty plays — among them Man and Superman, Pygmalion and Saint Joan — and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. He really did build a career on the idea that comedy is the safest delivery vehicle for an unwelcome truth, which is exactly why a line he never wrote sticks to him so well: his own Father Keegan says “My way of joking is to tell the truth” in John Bull’s Other Island.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Best available research
Garson O’Toole, “Quote Origin: If You Want To Tell People the Truth, You’d Better Make Them Laugh or They’ll Kill You,” Quote Investigator, 17 March 2016. Earliest attestation documented there: Cecile Starr, “Ideas on Film,” The Saturday Review, 13 October 1951, crediting George Bernard Shaw — the earliest precisely dated of the 1951 printings. No source in Shaw’s own writings has been identified.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you’?” Last verified 27 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-you-want-to-tell-people-the-truth-make-them-laugh/