One of the things that most people don’t understand about jokes is that they’re all grievances. Every joke is a grievance. […] These grievance jokes are always getting rid of animus, and when jokes stop, then people are not getting rid of their grievances.
—Marshall McLuhan on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970 [via the “deeply linked” box.net widget, which ironically does not permit deeplinking to files it contains]
See, this is exactly what I was trying to say. Jokes are the cure to (or, as McLuhan would have it, the exorcist of) all life’s ills.