The attempt to develop a sense of humour and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned... — Viktor E. Frankl

The attempt to develop a sense of humour and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.

Author: Viktor E. Frankl

Insight: Most of us think humor is something we either have or we don't—you're naturally funny or you're not. But Frankl is pointing at something different: that finding the humor in things is actually a survival skill, something you can get better at. It's not about cracking jokes; it's about the ability to step back from a terrible moment and see its absurdity, its irony, its strange human particularity. That shift in perspective is what keeps you from drowning in the weight of things. The tricky part is that developing this sense feels almost wrong when you're in pain or facing something genuinely difficult. Humor can feel cheap or dismissive in those moments. But Frankl learned this in a concentration camp—maybe the worst imaginable circumstances—and what he noticed was that people who could laugh, even quietly, even at themselves, had better odds at staying human. They weren't laughing away their problems. They were using humor as a tool to maintain enough distance from their suffering that they could still think, still choose how to respond. In everyday life, this shows up whenever you catch yourself getting angry at something ridiculous—like when your tech stops working at exactly the wrong moment, or when you say something awkward and replay it endlessly. The people who recover fastest aren't the ones who deny what happened. They're the ones who can let themselves see how perfectly, almost cosmically timed the disaster was. That tiny laugh is actually an act of freedom.

Source: Man's Search for Meaning, p. 115, 1946