Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

Colette’s aphorism treats humor not as a decorative pleasure but as a basic condition of livability. “Total absence” implies an absolute seriousness that leaves no room for perspective, play, or the emotional elasticity needed to endure disappointment, desire, aging, and social constraint—recurring pressures in Colette’s work and life. Humor here functions as a survival faculty: it punctures self-importance, softens cruelty, and allows one to inhabit contradictions without breaking. The line also hints at an ethic of resilience: to keep living, one must retain the capacity to see the comic, the absurd, or the lightly ironic even in hardship.