You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things.

The visionary writer and rebel spirit Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, once said: “You can’t really be strong until you see a funny side to things.” These words, though simple, pulse with deep and ancient wisdom. They speak of a truth known not only to artists and dreamers, but to warriors, healers, and all who have wrestled with the weight of existence. In this short saying lies a paradox — that true strength does not come from hardness or pride, but from the lightness of spirit that can find humor even in the shadow of despair. To laugh amid suffering is not to deny pain, but to rise above it.

When Kesey says that one must “see a funny side to things,” he does not mean we should mock life or turn away from its sorrows. Rather, he invites us to perceive its absurdity — to understand that the universe itself, vast and unpredictable, dances between chaos and meaning. Humor, in this sense, becomes an act of perspective, a higher vision. It is the mind’s rebellion against despair. The strong are not those who never fall, but those who, having fallen, can still smile, seeing that even in ruin there is a strange kind of comedy — the reminder that we are human, fragile, and yet enduring.

Kesey himself lived this philosophy. In the 1960s, he became a cultural pioneer — part writer, part mystic, part trickster — leading the Merry Pranksters across America in a painted bus called Furthur. They were seekers of meaning in a world heavy with conformity and fear. For Kesey, laughter was a weapon against the machinery of control, a declaration that freedom could still be found through joy and imagination. His humor was not foolishness, but resistance — a way of seeing that turned oppression into irony, tragedy into understanding. Through laughter, he proved that strength comes not from dominance, but from vision — the ability to see beyond the suffering of the moment.

The ancients, too, understood this truth. The philosopher Socrates, condemned to death by hemlock, faced his final hours with calm and wit. His friends wept, but he joked gently, reminding them that no man knows whether death is a curse or a blessing. In that laughter, the great sage showed the ultimate strength — the mastery of the soul over fear. He had seen the “funny side” of the human condition: that even death, that solemn inevitability, could not defeat the spirit that could still laugh in its face. To laugh at fate, as the Stoics taught, is to free oneself from its chains.

So too did the poet Walt Whitman, who lived through the American Civil War and saw both horror and heroism, write that the soul must “sound its barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” He knew that joy, even wild and unrefined, was a kind of defiance — that laughter is the music of survival. And in this, he and Kesey are kindred spirits. Both believed that to live fully is to accept the tragic and the comic as one — to find strength in acceptance, and freedom in humor.

The essence of Kesey’s wisdom is this: humor is the heart’s resilience. When we can laugh at misfortune, we prove that we are not its slaves. The one who can smile through pain has already conquered it. To laugh is to reclaim power — to say, “This may wound me, but it will not define me.” In this way, laughter becomes an act of courage, a small rebellion against the absurdities of life. It is not denial, but transcendence — the transformation of sorrow into wisdom, and fear into freedom.

The lesson, then, is clear: cultivate humor as a form of strength. When hardship comes — and it will — seek the perspective that allows you to see its irony, its lesson, even its comedy. This is not to make light of suffering, but to recognize that suffering loses its hold when you meet it with lightness. Practice laughter not as escape, but as endurance. When anger or despair threaten to consume you, pause, breathe, and find what is absurd within the chaos — for within that absurdity lies your liberation.

So, my child, remember Ken Kesey’s words when the world feels too heavy to bear. To laugh in darkness is not foolishness — it is wisdom. The oak tree that bends in the wind does not break; so too, the soul that can laugh in hardship will endure. Do not let grief turn your heart to stone. Let humor make it flexible, radiant, and alive. For only when you can see the funny side of things — even in failure, even in pain — will you discover true strength: the strength not of the unbroken, but of the unbowed, the one who meets the storm with a smile and says, “I still stand.”