Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
Interpretation
Common sense and humor are interconnected; humor represents a playful aspect of common sense.
William James suggests that common sense and a sense of humor are essentially the same, but they operate differently. While common sense is straightforward and practical, a sense of humor adds a playful, lively element to our understanding of situations, akin to how dancing adds movement to music. This quote emphasizes the importance of lightheartedness and perspective in navigating life.
In practice
During a speech about resilience, I shared this quote to illustrate the role of humor in tough times.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you.
He who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
You look at the world and see how scary it can be sometimes and still try to deal with the fear. Comedy can deal with the fear and still not paralyze you or tell you that it's going away. You say, OK, you got certain choices here, you can laugh at them and then once you've laughed at them and you have expunged the demon, now you can deal with them. That's what I do when I do my act.
You know when you're sitting on a chair and you lean back so you're just on two legs and you lean too far so you almost fall over but at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time.
One place that I really feel comfortable is being a comedienne. I'm very socially inept. There's so many things that I can not do in life, and this is, like, the one thing that I have mastery over. It's my world. And anybody who's coming to the show, it's like they're coming because they know that this is my world.
I actually don't want a throne at all, because I don't view myself as a queen; I view myself as one of my fans.
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