Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
Interpretation
Common sense and humor are interconnected; humor represents a playful aspect of common sense.
William James suggests that common sense and a sense of humor are essentially the same, but they operate differently. While common sense is straightforward and practical, a sense of humor adds a playful, lively element to our understanding of situations, akin to how dancing adds movement to music. This quote emphasizes the importance of lightheartedness and perspective in navigating life.
In practice
During a speech about resilience, I shared this quote to illustrate the role of humor in tough times.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
I think that sometimes you do something that makes a small group of people laugh, which is all we were trying to do; we were just trying to make each other laugh.
And thus being totally preoccupied, he rode so slowly that the sun was soon glowing with such intense heat that it would have melted his brains, if he'd had any.
I'm a big woman. I need big hair.
A fit of laughter, which has been indulged to excess, almost always produces a violent reaction.
I think that comedy really tells you how it is. The other thing about comedy is that - you don't even know if you're failing in drama, but you do know when you're failing in comedy. When you go to a comedy and you don't hear anybody laughing, you know that you've failed.
Benchley and I had an office in the old Life magazine that was so tiny, if it were an inch smaller it would have been adultery.
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