Happiness Quote by James Thurber

Thurber’s genius was always the sideways glance: the joke that lands a beat late, after you’ve noticed the bruise underneath it. Here he treats laughter not as relief but as evidence, a diagnostic sound that can signal cruelty, denial, panic, or pure social performance. Tears are legible; they declare injury. Laughter, in Thurber’s view, is slippery enough to be weaponized. It can belong to the crowd, not the individual, and that’s where it turns “terrible” - it erases responsibility by dissolving it into a roomful of noise.

The string of adjectives is doing quiet, nasty work. “Hollow” and “heartless” strip laughter of sincerity; “mirthless” is the dagger twist, implying a laugh with no joy attached, a reflex or a mask. Then “maniacal” detonates the whole list, suggesting not just bad taste but a loss of control: laughter as symptom, as hysteria, as the body’s betrayal when the mind can’t metabolize what it’s seeing.

Placed against Thurber’s era - between two world wars, in the rise of mass media and mass politics - the line reads like a warning about public emotion. Comedy doesn’t automatically civilize; it can anesthetize. It can also police: laugh at the outsider, laugh to keep the conversation from getting serious, laugh so you don’t have to cry. Thurber isn’t being anti-humor. He’s being anti-innocence about it.