"This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-
grade and trivial things—broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries,
absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade
comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull
vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of
these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy
them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really
effective weapon — laughter. Power,
money, persuasion, supplication, persecution — these can lift at a
colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by
century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing
can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons.
Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do
you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage," - Satan, in Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger."
