Happiness Quote by Francois Rabelais

Rabelais doesn’t defend laughter as a cute preference; he smuggles it in as a philosophy of the human. “Better to write of laughter than of tears” sounds like an aesthetic choice, but it’s really a hierarchy of values: comedy as truth-telling, sorrow as the story authorities already know how to exploit. Then he lands the provocation: laughter is “the property of man.” Not innocence, not reason, not piety, but the one reflex that exposes our double nature: bodily, ridiculous, self-aware. Laughter announces that we’re animals who can watch ourselves being animals.

The context matters because Rabelais is a clergyman writing in a Renaissance culture where religious and political power often demanded solemnity as proof of legitimacy. To prioritize laughter is to refuse intimidation. It’s an argument for the carnivalesque - the world flipped, the high dragged down, the sacred tested by the comic. Comedy becomes a solvent. It dissolves pretension, punctures doctrinal certainty, and makes room for skeptical intelligence without having to preach skepticism.

There’s also a strategic subtext: laughter as cover. If you want to criticize medicine, law, clerical hypocrisy, or the machinery of authority, you can say you’re only joking. Rabelais turns that dodge into a weapon. Tears can be coerced; laughter has to be earned, and once it happens it creates a brief republic where the reader is not being managed but awakened.