Happiness Quote by Alice Meynell

Meynell treats humor less like a punchline and more like a private instrument of perception. Her line quietly rebukes the Victorian-era assumption that laughter is humor's proof-of-life, the visible receipt you hand the room to confirm you understood the joke. For a poet steeped in restraint and moral seriousness, that kind of conspicuousness can feel vulgar, even coercive: laughter becomes performance, social signaling, a demand to be counted among the amused.

The sentence turns on "other things to do". Humor, in Meynell's framing, isn’t a party trick; it’s a mode of intelligence. It can cut vanity down to size, deflate false piety, keep grief from hardening into self-importance. It can be quiet, even inaudible, working as an internal counterweight to melodrama. That subtext matters because poets like Meynell traded in precision and understatement; the most devastating wit often arrives as a slight change in angle, not a roar.

There's also a social critique buried in the grammar. "To make itself conspicuous" suggests the ego's hunger to be seen: the laugh that announces, "I get it, I'm in on it". Meynell implies that true humor doesn't need that badge. It can sit inside a sentence, a glance, a refusal to take the self as the main character. In a culture anxious about decorum and sincerity, she gives humor a stealth ethic: its highest function may be to keep us honest, not to keep us entertained.