Happiness Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray isn`t praising laughter as a cute personality trait; he`s using it as a social litmus test. If you can`t laugh, especially at yourself, you`re probably guarding a brittle self-image. The sting in "always" is deliberate: it turns an observation into a moral diagnosis, the kind a Victorian novelist could smuggle into polite conversation while still drawing blood.

The line works because it flips the era`s usual hierarchy. In Thackeray`s England, respectability is a performance, status is theater, and "pompous" is what happens when someone mistakes the costume for the person underneath. Laughter becomes a pressure valve that proves you know the game is a game. The person who can`t laugh is not merely humorless; they`re invested in being taken seriously at all costs, which reads as vanity, insecurity, or both. "Self-conceited" isn`t just arrogance, it`s self-absorption: a mind so occupied with its own importance it has no room for play, irony, or empathy.

Context matters: Thackeray made a career of puncturing pretension, from the social climbing and moral posturing of Vanity Fair to the everyday hypocrisies that keep class and reputation intact. His satire isn`t nihilistic; it`s corrective. He`s implying that laughter is a kind of ethical flexibility, an ability to see your own absurdities and, by extension, grant other people theirs. Without that, you don`t get dignity - you get stiffness, and stiffness curdles into pomposity.