Happiness Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s line plays like a civility tip until you hear the blade inside it: laughter isn’t just an emotion, it’s a social solvent. “You are not angry with people when you laugh at them” hinges on a sly grammatical choice. Not laughing with them - laughing at them. He’s admitting humor’s mild cruelty, then arguing that the cruelty is still preferable to rage. Mockery turns moral heat into something cooler, more manageable, and therefore less likely to become punitive.

The subtext is classically Maugham: the world is full of petty vanity, hypocrisy, and self-deception; you can’t reform it, but you can keep yourself from becoming a zealot about it. Comedy becomes a kind of emotional harm reduction. If you can see the ridiculousness in someone, you’re forced to see their human scale. They’re not a monster, they’re a type. That shift from “enemy” to “character” is where tolerance sneaks in.

Context matters because Maugham made a career out of drawing-room satire and social observation in a British culture that prized restraint. In that ecosystem, laughter is a sanctioned release valve. It polices behavior without calling the police. The implication is both generous and unsettling: tolerance doesn’t always come from empathy; sometimes it comes from the refusal to take people seriously enough to hate them. Comedy, for Maugham, is not kindness. It’s a workable substitute for vengeance.