Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Szasz

Self-mockery is Szasz's litmus test for sanity, but it is also a social threat disguised as advice. The line pivots on a hard, almost courtroom-like conditional: once you lose the ability to laugh at yourself, you forfeit the right to manage your own story. And someone else will do it for you, publicly.

Szasz, a psychiatrist-turned-critic of modern psychiatry, spent his career arguing that "mental illness" often functions as a moral label and a tool of control. Read in that context, the quote is less a Hallmark bromide about humility than a warning about what happens when people (or institutions) claim exemption from ordinary human fallibility. The person who "can no longer laugh at himself" isn't merely humorless; he's insulated, convinced of his own special status, perhaps even eager to medicalize or punish dissent. Szasz's bite is that humor is a check on that impulse. If you can't perform the small democratic act of self-ridicule, you invite the crowd to restore proportion by turning you into the joke.

The subtext is not gentle: laughter becomes enforcement. It's community as corrective, ridicule as accountability. That can read as bracing, even healthy, until you notice the edge-case: "others" laughing at you can slide from puncturing arrogance into cruelty, the kind of stigma Szasz himself warned about. The line works because it captures a real cultural mechanism: we grant credibility to people who can absorb irony, and we distrust those who treat themselves as beyond it.