From The Radical Act of Being a Better Person and Then Maybe Dying- An Interview with Wendy Xu:

I love humor, I love stand-up comedy, I love the mental acrobatics that an intricate joke requires and the pay-off it provides. I suppose I think that these two things are so close to one another. I am sincerely invested in your happiness when I work earnestly at making you laugh. Telling a joke is so kind, it is something we do to improve the lives of others.... 

In a wider sense, I think I would very literally die (I am not trying to make a book-title joke) if I resigned myself to humorlessness. “The news” would simply crush me. Wall Street would crush me. And in my helplessness and inability to heal and laugh with others, it would be easier for every Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin to legislate me out of their America. I want to laugh so that later I can get angry like I need to get. I want to make and think something funny and tender and kind so that I recognize the opposite when it comes for me, so that I can say “No” to a corporation, so that I cannot buy what someone means to sell me. Poetry is so high stakes. Humor is wholly tied up in those stakes for me.

[via front porch journal]