Harvey Mindess on the Sense of Humor

The extent to which our sense of humor can help us to maintain our sanity is the extent to which it moves beyond jokes, beyond wit, beyond laughter itself.  It must constitute a frame of mind, a point of view, a deep-going far-reaching attitude to life.
   A cluster of qualities characterizes this peculiar frame of mind: flexibility, in this case an indvidual’s willingness to examine every side of every issue and every side of every side; spontaneity, his ability to leap from one mood or mode of thought to another; unconventionality, his freedom from the values of his time, his place, and his profession; shrewdness, his refusal to believe that anyone—least of all himself—is what he seems to be; playfulness, his grasp of life as a game, a tragicomic game that nobody wins but that does not have to be won to be enjoyed; and humility, that elusive quality. . . . A man who can shrug off the insufficiency of his ultimate wisdom, the meaninglessness of his profoundest thoughts, is a man in touch with the very soul of humor.
   Each of these six qualities plays its part in the drama of the humorous outlook.  The starring role, however, is reserved for another characteristic.  We may call it the enjoyment of the ironies that permeate our lives.  In order to command a therapeutic sense of humor, we must become acutely aware of the anomalies that run through all human affairs.  We must come to know, not theoretically but practically, that the happiest relationships are larded with suffering, that the greatest accomplishments are anticlimactic, that rational acts are motivated by irrational drives, that psychotic thinking makes excellent sense.  We must know that assertiveness is the mask of fearfulness, that humility is a kind of pride, that love is a euphemism for lust, that truth is the pawn of fashion, that we cherish our misery, and that we all are more irrational than we acknowledge.