[...] Humor is a meditation upon death. It is by this difference that we are best able to understand the nature of a life lived in the comic mode. The fact that I will not live two hundred years, let alone forever, is what is preventing me from writing my gelastical magnum opus. It is also what makes gelastics possible in the first place: that we are mortal, and therefore doomed. [...]

But could there really be no liberation short of offing the tyrant? Is there not another species of emancipation in flights of the spirit, even if they change nothing in our material reality? The playing field of the imagination is infinite, after all. So even though humor forces us back into our heavy bodies--and even though, therefore, we can never mistake a gelastic experience for an aesthetic one--nevertheless in the gelastic mode too we experience a variety of freedom. [...]