Life's Pleasures Quote by Doris Roberts

Doris Roberts delivers this like a piece of hard-earned stage direction: if you want to survive grief, you need a prop, a rhythm, a cue to move. Putting humor above food isn’t a cute exaggeration; it’s a hierarchy of necessities from someone who spent a lifetime watching audiences metabolize pain in real time. Food keeps the body going. Humor keeps the self intact - the part that can still connect, still recognize absurdity, still choose.

The quote’s engine is its blunt permission to treat laughter as triage. Roberts doesn’t romanticize mourning; she frames it as a fork in the road: collapse or re-enter the world. That binary is intentionally provocative. It’s not that grief is simple, it’s that the choice to keep living has to be made repeatedly, even when it feels impossible. Humor becomes the lever that pries you off the floor, not because death is funny, but because life continues to be weird, messy, and sometimes ridiculous in the same room as loss.

Then she swerves from self-help to ethics: “Do something for someone else.” That’s the subtextual rebuttal to grief’s narcissistic gravity. Helping others isn’t sainthood; it’s a practical counterweight, a way to rejoin the social contract when you’ve been knocked out of it. Coming from an actress known for comedy, it’s also a quiet defense of the genre: humor isn’t escapism. It’s civic.