Happiness Quote by Moliere

Respectability is a fragile costume, and comedy is the hand that yanks at the seams. Moliere’s line is sly because it treats laughter not as a harmless reaction but as a social event with consequences: to make “respectable people” laugh is to coax them, briefly, into abandoning the posture that earns them their rank. The “strange enterprise” isn’t that humor is difficult; it’s that it’s culturally risky. Respectability depends on controlled signals - dignity, restraint, proper taste. Laughter is a loss of control, a bodily admission that something punctured the script.

The subtext is a quiet accusation: the respectable aren’t simply virtuous; they’re invested. They have something to protect, and comedy threatens it by exposing vanity, hypocrisy, and the self-serving logic hiding under “good manners.” In Moliere’s world, the pious, the bourgeois, the courtly all prize appearances as a kind of currency. To get them laughing is to get them spending that currency in public, revealing they’re not above the farce; they’re in it.

Context sharpens the bite. Moliere wrote inside a system that alternately patronized and policed him. Tartuffe was attacked for impiety because it made the wrong people squirm - and worse, made audiences enjoy the squirming. So the quote doubles as a working artist’s diagnosis: comedy is a negotiation with power. You want the elite in your seats, but your job is to show them their reflection, slightly uglier, while they’re still smiling. That’s the trick: seduction as critique.