. . . Such sobriety mingled with virtue is the stuff of saints.

And by way of corollary, the recovery of spiritual sanity will have humor as one of its signs. For humor is among other things the perception of imbalance as imbalanced and the appreciation of incongruity as incongruous.

Self-absorbed observers are not observers at all, and so they tend to humorlessness; they lack a platform in reality from which to measure the lack of measure around them.

In the present life of culture, and certainly in this moment of the Church, extremists on the left and on the right have a common inability to laugh at themselves.

Healthy jokes are to them like a strange sound frequency to a dog: they turn their heads, they look distressed, but they do not laugh.