A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.

The remark defines humor not as carefree cheerfulness but as an emotional alchemy: the humorist registers pain, disappointment, or unease (“feels bad”) yet gains a compensating pleasure by shaping that feeling into a joke (“feels good about it”). It suggests that comedy can be a form of resilience and control—transforming private suffering into a shareable insight. The line also implies a moral psychology of wit: the humorist’s gift is not the absence of trouble but the ability to stand slightly apart from it, to observe one’s own misery with enough detachment to make it meaningful, tolerable, and even enjoyable for others.