Happiness Quote by Red Skelton

Skelton’s line doesn’t sell laughter as a cure; it sells it as contraband relief. “Forget it for a few seconds” is the tell: modest, almost stingy, and therefore believable. A comedian who spent his life mining pratfalls and soft-shoe charm isn’t pretending pain evaporates. He’s arguing for a tiny, repeatable reprieve - the kind you can actually access when you’re broke, grieving, or exhausted. In an American culture that often demands either heroic resilience or tidy self-help redemption, Skelton offers a third option: temporary escape with no spiritual paperwork.

The intent is practical. Laughter is framed as a tool, not a personality trait, and the tool works even when everything else fails because it hijacks attention. The subtext is almost physiological: a joke doesn’t debate your sadness, it interrupts it. That’s why the time limit matters. “A few seconds” acknowledges heartache as a stubborn, ongoing condition while still insisting you can carve out a pocket of air inside it.

Context sharpens the edge. Skelton came up through vaudeville and radio, then became a TV-era household name when entertainment doubled as national coping mechanism - wartime broadcasts, postwar domestic stress, the long middle stretch of Cold War anxiety. His comedy was famously gentle, but this sentiment isn’t naive. It’s a working performer’s truth: the audience doesn’t need a lecture, it needs a beat where the body remembers how to breathe.