I really liked his remarks on humor. It's taken me a long time, but I think I've finally arrived at a definition of humor that works for me. You will note I use the idea of "definition" operationally, not formally. That is, it isn't something that you look up in the dictionary, that we all can agree on to use so we all know exactly what it is we are talking about. An operational definition is one that is deliberately, perhaps even arbitrarily, devised to shed some insight into complex concept, to try and make some sense of it in a particular context. If you have to look up humor in the dictionary, you're not a very funny guy, and if we have to all agree on what humor really is, no one is likely to be laughing.

My definition of humor is that it is the recognition of the absurdity of existence. Nothing in the world has to make any sense, there is no meaning to anything anywhere. There is pattern, but no order, a reason for everything, but a purpose to nothing. The world is a beautiful place, and a horrible place, but it is neither good nor evil, it is indifferent to us. It rumbles along in its own random fashion, like an avalanche, and like an avalanche, it simply doesn't care if you are in the way. It doesn't even know you are there. If you're looking for meaning, you're going to have to make your own. The good part is you get to define it any way you like.

I don't mean to imply that nothing matters, that nothing is important. On the contrary, life is a very serious affair. It demands our full attention. But we get to define (there's that word again!)what matters, and how. We get to pick what's important. THAT is freedom, true freedom, the ability to decide what it is about this random, entropic chaos around us that we need to deal with, and how. It matters to us, and to those we love. But that's the only thing that matters.
The only thing in the world is you, and yours. Everything else is just beautiful, but potentially deadly scenery. And in the end, it's going to get you anyway, there's not a damned thing you can do about it. And once you realize that, you have little choice but to laugh. You laugh or you get angry and bitter, or go mad.

I learned this from my stepfather. He was a humble man, of average intelligence and little education, but infinite wisdom and almost incomprehensible courage. He was born in the Cuban countryside, and had spent his life as a peasant, a soldier, a fugitive and an exile. He had been years in combat, fought in a brutal civil war, a no-quarter-asked, none-given guerilla struggle, and spent an endless year with a price on his head and a pistol in his coat, the secret police just one step behind him, forced to place his most beloved friends and family in mortal danger just to keep himself alive. But it had not broken him. He could function alone in a foreign country where he did not know the language and where he was forced to do the most degrading and monotonous work just to feed himself, and, eventually, to learn a new profession in his late middle age. And he still managed to live life cheerfully and bravely, and treat his new family and his stepchildren with a deep and genuine love, and always, an infinite good humor.

His hard life never succeeded in beating the humanity out of him. He always was able to abstract himself from his situation, shrug his shoulders, roll his eyes, and ask himself---what the hell is life going to throw at me NOW? It took me a long time to understand how he managed to cope, he could not explain it to me in abstract terms, but eventually by just witnessing his example, I saw how he did it. Life was a joke, an elaborate and complex joke, and it was on him. He was forced to roll through it all, like the bewildered Cantinflas character of Spanish film comedy (the Mexican Charlie Chaplin). Shit just happened, it happened to him, and he was stuck in the middle of it whether he liked it or not. Hell, you had to laugh. What other alternative was there?