"We do not take humor seriously enough"
About this Quote
Lorenz’s line lands like a rebuke disguised as a shrug: the problem isn’t that we joke too much, it’s that we misfile humor as decorative. Coming from a scientist best known for studying animal behavior, the sentence carries a quiet provocation: if you’re serious about how humans (and other social creatures) work, you can’t treat laughter as cultural frosting. You have to treat it as data.
The wording does sly double duty. “Do not take” implicates a collective habit, not individual taste; “seriously enough” avoids piety and suggests calibration, like an instrument reading that’s off. Lorenz isn’t asking us to stop laughing, he’s asking us to stop underestimating what laughter is doing: policing norms, defusing aggression, testing boundaries, building alliances. Humor is where a group negotiates what can be said, by whom, and with what consequences, often faster and more ruthlessly than formal debate.
The subtext is also defensive. Mid-century intellectual life loved the pose of severity; the lab coat and the manifesto both distrusted the comic as unserious, even suspect. Lorenz flips that hierarchy. If humor is a behavioral adaptation, then jokes aren’t an escape from reality but a tool for surviving it, a low-cost way to rehearse conflict, signal trust, or expose hypocrisy without triggering open war.
Read today, the line sharpens: in an era when memes can radicalize, cancel, or mobilize, “not taking humor seriously enough” isn’t quaint. It’s a warning about power hiding in punchlines.
The wording does sly double duty. “Do not take” implicates a collective habit, not individual taste; “seriously enough” avoids piety and suggests calibration, like an instrument reading that’s off. Lorenz isn’t asking us to stop laughing, he’s asking us to stop underestimating what laughter is doing: policing norms, defusing aggression, testing boundaries, building alliances. Humor is where a group negotiates what can be said, by whom, and with what consequences, often faster and more ruthlessly than formal debate.
The subtext is also defensive. Mid-century intellectual life loved the pose of severity; the lab coat and the manifesto both distrusted the comic as unserious, even suspect. Lorenz flips that hierarchy. If humor is a behavioral adaptation, then jokes aren’t an escape from reality but a tool for surviving it, a low-cost way to rehearse conflict, signal trust, or expose hypocrisy without triggering open war.
Read today, the line sharpens: in an era when memes can radicalize, cancel, or mobilize, “not taking humor seriously enough” isn’t quaint. It’s a warning about power hiding in punchlines.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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