Agnes Repplier on Humor and Other Subjects: "People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization"

Sunday is the day that Agnes Repplier passed away 74 years ago. The American writer (1858-1950) is three or four generations removed from us (if not five), and seems forgotten today but the woman once described as no less than "our dean of essayists" sounds like she was the blogger for over 50 years at the turn of the century (19th-20th). 

Wouldn't you say that the following quote applies to the left and their wokesters for (at least) the past 25 years?

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

Amen!

As it were, Agnes Repplier managed to put humor and mockery into perspective:

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

Hugh Prather said much the same thing: there are two kinds of humor in this life — the humor that unites, and the humor that divides. One is tempted to apply the following Agnes Repplier quote to conservatives and the quote following that to leftists:

The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.

The pessimist is seldom an agitating individual. His creed breeds indifference to others, and he does not trouble himself to thrust his views upon the unconvinced.

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.

There is always a secret irritation about a laugh into which we cannot join.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

And to conclude:

We hear so much about the sanitary qualities of laughter, we have been taught so seriously the gospel of amusement, that any writer, preacher, or lecturer, whose smile is broad enough to be infectious, finds himself a prophet in the market-place. Laughter, we are told, freshens our exhausted spirits and disposes us to good-will–which is true. It is also true that laughter quiets our uneasy scruples and disposes us to simple savagery. Whatever we laugh at, we condone, and the echo of man’s malicious merriment rings pitilessly through the centuries. Humour which has no scorn, wit which has no sting, jests which have no victim, these are not the pleasantries which have provoked mirth, or fed the comic sense of a conventionalized rather than a civilized world.