I’m sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I’ve never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.

Waldman frames humor not as a frivolous add-on to suffering but as a practical survival tool—an emotional technology that helps people metabolize grief, fear, and shock. The first sentence asserts, from lived observation, that resilience and comedy often coexist: those who endure catastrophe frequently rely on wit, irony, or dark laughter to regain agency and keep despair from becoming total. The second sentence shifts from psychology to aesthetics and craft: as a writer, she is drawn to characters and real people whose humor complicates tragedy, making them more human, unpredictable, and narratively alive. The quote also implies an ethic of attention—she prefers stories where pain is neither sentimentalized nor stripped of vitality.