audacity was only part of what Perelman was talking about. He was also talking about courage. Humor is the most perilous of writing forms, full of risk; to make a vocation of brightening the reader’s day is an act of continuing gallantry. He was also talking about energy. Energy is the divine spark in creative work. We know right away when we are i

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Whatever else happens, stay busy. (I always lean on this wise advice, from the seventeenth-century English scholar Robert Burton, on how to survive melancholy: “Be not solitary, be not idle.”) Find something to do—anything, even a different sort of creative work altogether—just to take your mind off your anxiety and pressure. Once, when I was strug

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Humor helps you see the familiar from a surprising new perspective.

It reminds you that there is no grand truth.

Any belief can be up-ended.

Every belief can be mocked.

Nobody knows anything.

See?

Laughing is subversive.

First of all I express sincerity. There’s also that sense of humor, by which people sometimes learn to laugh about themselves. I mean, the situation is so serious that the people could go crazy because of it. They need to smile and realize how ridiculous everything is. A race without a sense of humor is in bad shape. A race needs clowns. In earlier

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worrying proved to have been a waste of time. The problem was that I carried around with me a tendency to feel that other people’s respect for me would vanish if what I did was second rate. And while I accept that this ‘perfectionism’ is likely to stimulate the production of better work, it doesn’t, unfortunately, go hand in hand with a relaxed and

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