A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.

Fadiman’s line defines humor less as joke-telling than as self-knowledge. To “understand a joke” is to grasp incongruity and human foibles; to realize “the joke is oneself” adds the crucial element of self-directed irony. The remark suggests that mature humor depends on humility: recognizing one’s own pretensions, limitations, and contradictions without collapsing into self-contempt. In this view, laughter becomes a corrective to ego and a social lubricant—people who can laugh at themselves are harder to offend and easier to live with. The aphorism also implies that humor is a kind of wisdom, because it requires perspective on one’s place in the larger comedy of life.