Christian Wiman believes humor can do more than provide a temporary distraction from the hard realities of life in a broken world; there can be “an element of grace to it,” he says. Humor can have “existential reach,” meaning it “can imply a world in which the comic, not the tragic, is ultimate.”

He quotes Peter Berger, who discusses a “comic perception” on life:

Humor not only recognizes the comic discrepancy in the human condition, it also relativizes it, and thereby suggests that the tragic perspective on the discrepancies of the human condition can also be relativized. At least for the duration of the comic perception, the tragedy of man is bracketed (A Rumor of Angels).

How does this “comic perception” help a person navigate the tragic dimension of life? According to Wiman, “A comic perception can be not simply an act of faith, but a perdurable instant of time that faith itself can cling to — so long as that comic perception is, you might say, spiritually in tune with tragedy.”

— Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 69–70.