The Power of Laughter

I was listening to a lecture series on the Life and Work of Mark Twain and came across this passage in The Mysterious Stranger. It is part of a speech given by Satan to the story's main character.

You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things--broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution --these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.
Mark Twain (emphasis added)

The duality of this passage struck me immediately. Laughter is extremely powerful. It can take an event like serious illness or death and turn it into something powerless. It can break the ice in an awkward situation, and remove tensions between foes. Its power for good is tremendous.

But so also is its power for ill. It can be used to ridicule, demean, debase, and profane. And if everything is funny what do we have to hold on to and take seriously?

We need to be very careful how we wield this weapon of ours. We should make certain that the "colossal humbugs" that we are destroying are ones that should be destroyed.

With great power comes great responsibility.
Voltaire

Source: Life and Work of Mark Twain