So it’s 2022 and this here blog started out 20 years ago in 2002. In celebration of all those twos and zeroes — and as a way of ensuring more frequent threads — we’ll be posting On This Day flashbacks throughout the year.
This is from January 6, 2011, “‘Humorless prig’ is redundant“:
Smugness and the sin of pride makes you humorless. It reduces your capacity for recognizing humor, your ability to get jokes. And it almost totally eliminates your capacity for contributing humor, your ability to make jokes.
I realize that in the grand scheme of things, this may seem like a less important consequence than the soul-corroding evil or the harm done to others or the self-destructive abandonment of critical thinking. But joy matters. Cutting oneself off from humor isn’t good for you. It’s a way of cutting yourself off from redemption — from the gaiety transfiguring all this dread.
And it’s just possible that pointing out their humorlessness will sting more for the members of the IndigNation than will pointing out the other malignant consequences of their addiction to self-righteous self-congratulation. They don’t really seem to care that their bearing false witness does harm to others. And they don’t seem to miss the capacity for critical thinking that they have surrendered.
But, as Sinclair Lewis noted in Main Street, the accusation that one lacks a sense of humor is an insult “which no human being will endure.”
And Lords-a-leaping, today is also Epiphany, so here is another 2011 post that I’ve been linking back to or reposting annually since then: “Epiphany: One of Us.”
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