Time & Perspective Quote by Linda Ellerbee

Ellerbee turns laughter into a survival technology, not a party trick. Her line has the snap of a newsroom veteran who’s watched reality refuse to improve on schedule: wars roll on, institutions disappoint, and the day’s headlines arrive with the brute force of weather. Against that, she doesn’t offer optimism. She offers timing.

The key move is the phrase “in the face of reality.” Reality isn’t the thing you escape with laughter; it’s the thing you stare down while laughing. That flips the usual script where humor is denial or distraction. Ellerbee frames it as defiance: a sound that asserts you’re still here, still capable of judgment, still unwilling to let events set the entire emotional agenda.

Her metaphor, “the day when the game is called on account of darkness,” smuggles in mortality without melodrama. The “game” suggests we’re all playing under shared, arbitrary rules - deadlines, norms, expectations - until visibility fails. Darkness is both literal (the end) and civic (the information blackout, the moral fog). In a journalist’s mouth, that matters: laughter becomes a way to keep the lights on internally when the external picture is bleak.

“A good time to laugh is any time you can” reads like permission, almost a rebuttal to the guilt people feel about joy amid catastrophe. The subtext: laughter doesn’t trivialize suffering; it keeps you from being psychologically annexed by it. It’s a small, stubborn claim to agency when reality insists you have none.