Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

Solemnity and seriousness are not the same thing, and the first often gets in the way of the second. Weighty subjects handled too reverently produce careful, useless conversation in which nobody says anything they could be held to. Humour lets people get near what actually frightens them, which is why the funniest conversations so often go deepest.

When a subject is heavy, let it be funny in the places where it genuinely is. That is not a way of dodging the thing. It is frequently the only route by which people can approach it at all.