I think humor is used a lot of the time to keep people from getting too close. Humor side-steps and shifts the meaning.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
Humor is a very important thing. It is a natural predilection. It is an emotional release.
Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.
Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.
People often can't separate, or can't understand, that to be funny is to be serious; it's a way of pulling people in and not scaring them off. I think a lot of the funny stuff, underneath it, there's a deep anxiety going on.
Humor's an excellent way to make a point more palatable and/or relatable.
Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
Humor helps people open up.
I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more.