The more I live, the more I think that humor is the saving sense.

Humor as a survival tool

There's something almost defiant about this observation. Jacob Riis spent his life documenting the brutal poverty of tenement New York, photographing desperate conditions that would make most people despair. Yet his conclusion wasn't that we need more anger or pity—it was that humor might be our actual lifeline.

What he's getting at is that humor does something practical. It's not about laughing away real problems or pretending everything's fine. It's about maintaining enough distance from suffering to actually survive it, to keep moving, to remember you're still human. Anyone who's made it through a genuinely difficult period knows this instinctively—the moments you could joke about what was happening were often the moments you didn't break. Humor creates a small pocket of freedom even when circumstances are suffocating.

The saving part matters too. Riis isn't just saying humor feels good. He's suggesting it genuinely rescues us. From despair, from taking ourselves too seriously, from the trap of thinking everything is already lost. In a world full of legitimate reasons to be grim, the ability to find something funny—about a situation, about yourself, about the absurdity of it all—becomes genuinely protective.