Love Quote by Robertson Davies

Humor, for Davies, isn’t an escape hatch from reality; it’s a tool for pinning reality to the wall. “The love of truth” frames comedy as an act of fidelity, not frivolity. The best jokes don’t just decorate experience, they expose it: the quiet hypocrisies, the social scripts everyone pretends not to notice, the gap between what people say and what they’re doing. Laughter becomes a kind of recognition, a sudden, shared admission that the emperor’s outfit is, again, a rhetorical flourish.

The line also smuggles in a moral distinction between humor and mere mockery. Davies isn’t praising cruelty or cheap punchlines; he’s praising comedy’s investigative impulse. A comic doesn’t need to be tender, but they do need to be accurate. The “root” metaphor matters: truth isn’t the garnish on top of humor, it’s the underground system feeding it. Without that hidden seriousness, jokes turn brittle, relying on noise, shock, or tribal signaling instead of insight.

As a novelist, Davies understood that truth is rarely delivered as a lecture. Fiction works by indirection, letting readers arrive at what they already know but haven’t articulated. Humor does the same with speed and sting. It slips past defenses, then leaves the aftertaste of comprehension. In that sense, the quote argues for comedy as a kind of honesty practice: not the sanctimony of being right, but the bracing pleasure of seeing clearly, even when what you see is absurd.