A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Playfulness (31 quotes)
Experience is play, and meaning is replay and re-cognition.
Marshall McLuhan
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 142
Year: 1972
MCLUHAN: The planet is no longer nature. It’s no longer the external world. It’s now the content of an artwork.)
MAILER: Well, I think you’re anticipating a century, perhaps.
CBC-TV, “The Summer Way,” a discussion between MM and NM, 1968
CBC-TV, “The Summer Way,” a discussion between MM and NM, 1968
Year: 1968
Today, again, after a period of classified consumption, learning in a comprehensive world is becoming play, pattern recognition, discovery.
Culture is Our Business, (1970), p 118
Year: 1970
Courtney suggests that dramatic play begins with impersonation when a child is nearly a year old. It is an act of externalization of the internalized perceptions, that is, a kind of re-cognition, a re-play. Re-play may be a form of cognition; it is also a form of interpretation, a dramatic performance involving actors and audience.
“Roles, masks and Performances” (1971), reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2017), p 15
Year: 1971
Chapters:
Cognition and Recognition | Replay
“Le Mot Juste”
The “right” word is not the one that names the thing but the word that gives the effect of the thing.
Experience is play, and meaning is re-play and re-cognition. Far from being normal, successful communication is a rarity. It requires not only repetition of a common language, but also demands participation of both author and audience in the process of remaking from their old components a pattern that only the author may have perceived. Communicating the new is a miracle.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 142
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Communication
Popular art is the clown reminding us of all the life and faculty that we have omitted from our daily routines. He ventures to perform the specialized routines of the society, acting as integral man. But integral man is quite inept in a specialist situation. This, at least, is one way to get at the art of the comics, and the art of the clown.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 167
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Popular Culture | Roles
In an unspecialized world of computers and all-enveloping communications, sensitive intuition and openness will win more prizes, if you will, than unfeeling simplistic logic.”
“The Future of Sex” (1967), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 136
Year: 1967
The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine readily masters the grim and the dumb.
Counterblast (1969), p 55
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Computer
Drawn to McLuhan #13
Man in the future will not work—automation will work for him—but he may be totally involved as a painter is, or as a thinker is, or as a poet is. Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or at leisure.
““The Agenbite of Outwit”, In Location Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1963), reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research: Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 125
Year: 1963
Experience is play, and meaning is replay and re-cognition.
“The Quantum Leap from Science to Art”, in Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 142
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Cognition and Recognition | Replay
… specialism will yield to corporate role-playing on a mass scale.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, 1989, p 120
Year: 1989
Chapter:
Anticipating Change
It is the artist's job to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit attention to the new. To this end, the artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 254
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Art, Artists
Conversation is, for me, something like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a game in which you play all sorts of nose-dives and air-tumbles.
“Letter to Pete Buckner, October 28, 1971 (LAC), quoted in Gordon’s MM: Escape into Understanding, (1997), p 283
Year: 1971
Chapters:
Dialogue | McLuhan on McLuhan
My first feeling in Stockholm was: "Here is greatness consistent with human scale." The bounty of Sweden combines greatness and modesty, grandeur and playfulness, in the most unexpected ways.
“To King Carl Gustav of Sweden (1974)”, in Letters (1987), p 500
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Human Scale
As mime, the artist cannot be the prudent and decorous Ulysses, but appears as a sham. As sham and mime he undertakes not the ethical quest but the quest of the great fool. He must become all things in order to reveal all. And to be all he must empty himself... the artist cannot properly speak with his own voice.
“James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial” Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, Vol. 28, No 1, (1953), in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 31-32
Year: 1953
Chapter:
Art, Artists
In the pre-literate and post-literate worlds there are no subjects: just a total field in which to play!
“McLuhan Futuregram #1: Culture Is Our Big / New / Hot Business,” Dew-Line Newsletter, Vol 1 No. 4, October, 1968, p 5
Year: 1968
“Like Joyce, McLuhan is more interested in the fun than the pun. The pun itself is simply one of many weapons in a mammoth arsenal of verbal stunts; puns frequently become basic building blocks for more elaborate structures. For example, when McLuhan wrote, ‘Boldness of print created boldness of expression” he was not simply contrasting two meanings of one word; he was (1) using those related meanings to upset the reader’s expectations and (2) employing the identical words, ‘boldness’ and ‘boldness’ to perfectly balance a formally symmetric sentence. Placing such a tight, rhythmic sentence at the close of a more complex, verbally acrobatic paragraph adds a musical punctuation of contrast and completion. In composition, McLuhan knows the score.”
Thomas W. Cooper
Pioneers in Communication: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, dissertation, University of Toronto, 1979, p 277
Year: 1979
[Humor] as a system of communications…does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 92
Year: 1967
The teacher asked, “somebody define for me ‘nothing.’” And a child put his hand up at once and said, “teacher, when you peel a balloon, what you have left is nothing.”
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 14:00
Year: 1977
Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment —of what’s really going on— affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions. Older societies thrived on purely literary plots. They demanded story lines. Today’s humor, on the contrary, has no story line—no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay of stories.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 92
Year: 1967
The mere names of Twain and Leacock and Chaplin serve to recall their bitterness. Social anger and sensitivity sharpen the awareness of the funny man so that his "jokes" are stabs or probes into the cultural matrix that plagues him.
Laws of Media with Eric McLuhan (1988), p 132
Year: 1988
Electronically we are moving into an age of play which will bring many new patterns of work and learning. - McLuhan
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1973), in Media Research (1997) Look up p _
Year: 1973
And as for the cool war and the hot bomb scare, the cultural strategy that is desperately needed is humor and play. It is play that cools off the hot situations of actual life by miming them.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/ROUTLEDGE edition, p 31
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Hot & Cool
…fun through intelligibility…
MM’s description, circa 1947, of the manuscript that became The Mechanical Bride, quoted in W.T. Gordon, MM: Escape Into Understanding, 1997, p ___
Year: 1947
Humor is a profound area of research and social science because it shifts around with the shifting area of sensitivity and grievance….Slang is a spontaneous and natural behavior which records quite deep motivation. Slang, the grievance joke, and the joke without a story line all belong to the electric world, where everything happens at once.
“Television in a New Light” in The Meaning of Commercial Television (1966), p 90 [confirm book-source and year]
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Language
To the Wasp world the light-hearted approach to power represents aristocratic insouciance and security. The entertainer is a figure which they themselves have crowned. He is permitted to hurt them by his humour, for that is the mask of his power and relevance alike.
Letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau February 12, 1973; in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 470
Year: 1973
The clown is the emperor’s PR man
Card from the Dewline Newsletter deck of cards (1969): Joker
Year: 1969
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The cynical social legislation of to-day, undertaken in supposed accord with unyielding economic circumstance, is often light-headed because it is not light-hearted.
“G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic “(1936), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 4
Year: 1936
There is no time to do this, and anyhow the positive fact of St. Thomas makes it possible for us to feel light-hearted about the errors of smaller men. As our age enters its dark night let us take hope from the fact that the luminous wisdom and clarity of St. Thomas will shine more brightly for us.
“Education of Free Man in Democracy: The Liberal Arts.,” 1943, p 50
Year: 1943
The funny man as a professional clown puts on the corporate mask of a collective grievance. Jack Benny's stingy grimace and W. C. Fields' choleric profile serve to siphon off great stores of collective irritation and frustration in a society.
From Cliche to Archetype, 1970, p 133
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Putting On
One of the things that has become important is leisure. An artist is never at work; it’s because he’s always at leisure. When he’d totally involved in his work, he is not working, it’s play, it’s leisure… A gentleman never had any visible means of support because he was supposed to be an integral being. He didn’t fragment himself, he was totally involved, always at leisure. A great image of Sherlock Holmes himself. … We’re heading that way. Instead of heading into a world of joblessness, we’re heading towards a period of creative involvement, which is leisure. Involvement is far more demanding of our energies than any job could be. But when you’re totally involved, you’re playing, you’re not working. You’re at leisure.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 105
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Art, Artists