Success Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Lichtenberg turns a throwaway social moment - the joke that lands wrong - into a diagnostic tool. He’s not praising cruelty or the smug comedian; he’s mapping the boundary where ego overrides judgment. A man who “takes [a jest] badly” reveals what he’s protecting: status, pride, reputation, a fragile self-image that can’t tolerate being rearranged, even briefly, by someone else’s wit.

The line’s sharpness comes from its conditional frame: “If all else fails.” Character is slippery; people curate virtue, rehearse humility, perform patience. But humor is an ambush. It arrives sideways, bypassing the careful script, asking for a quick moral reflex. Lichtenberg bets that in that reflex - the flash of anger, sulking, threats, moral outrage deployed as a shield - you catch the person unedited. The subtext is Enlightenment-cynical: reason is the ideal, vanity is the reality, and social life is a lab where the subject keeps trying to fake the results.

Context matters. Lichtenberg was a scientist and aphorist steeped in the culture of salons, pamphlets, and barbed wit. In that world, jests were both entertainment and intellectual sparring, a test of temperament. Taking a joke badly isn’t just humorlessness; it’s a refusal of proportion, an inability to distinguish an insult from a pinprick, a critique from a threat. He’s also warning the joker: what people can’t laugh at tells you where power sits - and where it panics.