Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to spot a true believer: they’re right, you’re wrong, and you had better be careful about what you say and do because every fundamentalist fire needs fresh kindling to keep the flames of rage and self-righteousness burning. “[T]he subtlest and cruelest crimes are perpetrated by those who take things seriously,” E.M. Cioran wrote in A Short History of Decay. They can also usually be identified by an unremitting earnestness and the conspicuous absence of any real sense of humour. Milan Kundera liked to recount how he and his friends in the Czech underground could always tell when a Soviet agent had infiltrated their circle: although the agent looked like them and talked like them, invariably, he or she wasn’t funny.

This is because humour grants us the rare opportunity to step outside of ourselves and our private concerns for a moment, a chance to move a little to the side of selfhood and to see more than one aspect of an issue or an idea or a person. In Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, Kundera defines humour as “the divine flash that reveals the world in its moral ambiguity and man in his profound incompetence to judge others.” Humour, to Kundera, can reveal “the intoxicating relativity of human things; the strange pleasure that comes of the certainty that there is no certainty.”

It’s a miniature, momentary version of what Keats called “negative capability,” that rare state when someone “is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Keats singled out Shakespeare as that uncommon individual who could maintain this near-kaleidoscopic state of ideational grace throughout the majority of his work. Because most of us aren’t Shakespeare, we have humour to aid us in occasionally seeing a little further afield than our limited, homegrown horizons. “Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds,” Clive James wrote. “A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.”

I’ve never read a book written by an author simply because they were Canadian. I understand where this nationalistic impulse came from — from a time when books set in Canada weren’t considered publishable, and “real” writers lived in New York or London — and as a Chatham, Ontario-born, Toronto-based writer, I’m thankful that this isn’t the case anymore (or at least not as much) and am grateful to all those who laboured to make it so. But I wouldn’t read someone’s book or listen to their music or watch their film merely because our passports happened to have the same country’s stamp on them. “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson wrote. The comedian Bill Hicks was a little less eloquent but no less spot on when, when someone asked him if he was proud to be American, he answered that he didn’t have a lot to do with it, actually, his parents just happened to fuck there.

I have read Mordecai Richler’s books — most of them, anyway, and some of them, or at least sections of them, many times. It wasn’t because he was born and raised and lived in Montreal for much of his life, but because he was a very good writer. And aside from his eager intelligence and elegant way with a sentence, what made him such a good writer was his sense of humour. His corrosive, quick-witted, huge-hearted sense of humour that suffers no fools and makes no apologies for finding the world full of them (and, not infrequently, discloses that he’s one of them too).

Why do I rate humour so highly when it comes to what I read? I need laughter in my art because I need laughter in my life. “Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing,” Mark Twain declared. Not only does laughter sanctify our days — it’s easier to go a month without an orgasm than a week without laughing — but, deprived of it, how would we survive sadness and disappointment and loss? Poorly, I would imagine. “If I had no sense of humour, I would have long ago committed suicide,” Mahatma Gandhi said. Healing usually begins when the laughter does.

Humour also frequently saves me from myself. Sometimes my profession (writer) and my disease (obsessive-compulsive disorder) combine to help create a perfect storm of frantic fanaticism, which can lead to extremely diligent work habits, admittedly, but also a problematic lack of awareness of anyone or anything outside of my immediate field of frenzied vision. I can become a real asshole, in other words. Rude, moody, tetchy, monomaniacal. Other people and their ideas and needs are obstacles to be avoided until the job gets done. Anything other than what I’m working on is an irritating impediment to be justifiably ignored. Anything except what I’m writing is viewed through an upside down telescope, whereby the big world is reduced to a pinprick of dull darkness and the little world that is me and my work is enormously everything. Then something will make me laugh. It could be anything: a dog outside my kitchen window chasing its tail, for instance, is enough to shortcircuit my internal seriousness system and remind me that there are more important things in life than the paragraph I’m composing. Like a dog spinning around and around on the lawn on a sunny afternoon, knowing from experience it’ll probably never catch that tail, but having just a wonderful time doing its best to do so anyway. Laughter kills solemnity.

In her essay “The Desegregation of Art,” Muriel Spark argues that it does more than that: employed in literature, humour can both make us more aware of the world around us and help ourselves be more alive. Claiming that much contemporary literature (she was writing in 1970, but her point is just as, if not even more, valid half a century later) is founded upon “the representation of the victim against the oppressor” — for example, “in the dramatic portrayal of the gross racial injustices of our world, or in the exposure of the tyrannies of family life on the individual” — such art “cheats us into a sense of involvement with life and society, but in reality it is a segregated activity,” leading the reader to “feel that their moral responsibilities are sufficiently fulfilled by the emotions they have been induced to feel.” In place of what she calls “the art and literature of sentiment and emotion,” Spark advocates “the arts of satire and ridicule,” which, she believes, “bring about a mental environment of honesty and self-knowledge, a sense of the absurd and a general looking-lively to defend ourselves from the ridiculous oppressions of our time, and above all to entertain us in the process.” Appealing more to our intellect than to our emotions, the reader is compelled to see, reflect, and think, rather than to merely feel (and post to their Instagram account) pious thoughts.

Ray Robertson is the author of nine novels, seven collections of non-fiction, and a book of poetry. He has been a finalist for the Hillary Weston Prize for Nonfiction and the Trillium Book Award, and long-listed for the Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, he lives in Toronto.

Excerpted from The Right to Be Wrong by Ray Robertson. Copyright © 2026 by Ray Robertson. Published by Cormorant Books. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.