Happiness Quote by John Masefield

A proverb dressed up in formalwear, Masefield's line turns the act of laughing into a scoreboard. "Laughs longest" isn't about volume or joy; it's about endurance and timing. The first laugh is cheap: a reflex, a flex, a way to claim the room before the story has finished. The last laugh is the one that survives evidence.

Masefield, a poet who wrote under the shadow of two world wars and the churn of early 20th-century modernity, knew how quickly confidence curdles into embarrassment. Read in that context, the sentence is less a cozy moral than a warning against premature triumph. It's aimed at the heckler in the cheap seats, the bully who thinks the present is the whole plot, the cynic who believes irony is the same thing as insight. The line isn't optimistic; it's patient. It asks you to wager on outcomes, not vibes.

The subtext carries a mild cruelty, too. "He" is singular and competitive: there is a winner here, and laughter becomes a kind of social punishment administered at the end. That edge is why the phrase persists in everyday speech, especially in politics and celebrity culture, where reputations rise on a headline and collapse on the next one. Masefield gives a neat philosophy for an age of overconfident narrators: wait. Let time do the humiliating.