Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Comedy likes to pretend it floats above the mess, but Hazlitt drags it back to earth: every joke has a body. As a critic who watched the rise of mass entertainment and the coffeehouse public sphere, he’s allergic to the sentimental idea that humor is harmless “just kidding.” The line is spare, almost judicial, and that’s the point. “Generally” makes it feel like an observed law, not a moral panic. “Sure to be” suggests inevitability: laughter is rarely free; it’s financed by someone else’s dignity, exclusion, or pain.

Hazlitt’s intent is less to ban joking than to expose its power dynamics. A joke creates an inside and an outside in a single breath. It recruits the audience into complicity, offering the warm payoff of belonging in exchange for a target. That target can be obvious (the butt of the joke), but Hazlitt’s phrasing widens the field: sometimes the sufferer is the teller (who reveals insecurity), the listener (who’s pressured to laugh along), or the subject of a stereotype that keeps paying dividends long after the room moves on.

Context matters: Hazlitt wrote in a Britain tense with class friction, partisan journalism, and theatrical culture where ridicule was a political weapon. Satire could puncture hypocrisy, but it could also launder cruelty as sophistication. The subtext is a warning to the clever: wit is not virtue. If humor is a social act, it’s also a social cost. The question Hazlitt smuggles in is brutally contemporary: who’s paying for your laugh, and why are you comfortable with the bill?