You've got to have a sense of humor to keep your sanity.

When Lance Bass said, “You’ve got to have a sense of humor to keep your sanity,” he gave voice to one of the oldest truths of human existence — that laughter is not merely an indulgence, but a shield, a medicine, and a form of survival. In these simple words lies the wisdom of centuries: that in a world filled with uncertainty, sorrow, and trial, humor is the soul’s last defense against despair. Those who cannot laugh, cannot endure. For laughter is not weakness; it is strength wearing the mask of joy. It is how the heart remembers light even when the world turns dark.

The ancients knew this well. The Stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome — men like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius — taught that we cannot always control what happens to us, but we can control how we perceive it. Humor, they would say, is the art of perception at its most graceful. It allows us to see tragedy and absurdity side by side and to recognize that life, though painful, is also profoundly strange and beautiful. A man who can laugh in hardship has already claimed victory over it, for his spirit remains untouchable.

History offers countless examples of souls who kept their sanity through laughter. During the horrors of the Second World War, Viktor Frankl, imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, wrote that even there — in the shadow of death — humor had the power to lift a man beyond suffering. Prisoners would whisper jokes in the barracks, mocking their oppressors, mocking even fate itself. That laughter was not denial. It was defiance — the last, unconquerable act of the human will. It was proof that though their bodies were captive, their minds remained free. As Frankl later wrote, “Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.”

Lance Bass, in his own way, speaks from this same lineage of endurance. Though his world was not one of war, he faced the relentless scrutiny of fame, the pressure of expectation, and the inner struggle of identity in the public eye. In the bright glare of celebrity, where judgment is constant and mistakes are magnified, humor becomes both armor and healing. To laugh at oneself, to find joy in absurdity, is to reclaim one’s peace. In laughter, the soul refuses to be broken by the weight of perfection or the cruelty of opinion.

There is a sacred wisdom in this kind of laughter — the laughter that knows pain and yet chooses grace. It is not the empty mirth of ignorance, but the laughter of resilience. It is the same laughter that echoed through battlefields and hospitals, through prison walls and lonely nights. It says, “I will not give my sorrow the power to silence my joy.” For sanity is not the absence of pain, but the ability to remain whole in the midst of it. And humor, like the breath of the divine, restores that wholeness.

In every life, there will come a time when reason falters and sorrow presses close. It is then that the soul must learn to laugh — not in cruelty or denial, but in courage. Laugh at the absurdities of fate, at your own clumsy humanity, at the strange beauty of this imperfect world. Let laughter become your prayer, your rebellion, your salvation. For as Bass reminds us, those who can laugh are never truly lost; they have found a way to keep their minds clear and their hearts open, even amid chaos.

The lesson, then, is timeless: cultivate your sense of humor as you would a garden of light. Tend to it when the days are long and the nights are heavy. When you are wounded, let laughter remind you that you still live. When you are weary, let it carry you forward. The wise have always known this truth — that humor is not escape, but endurance, not denial, but divine perspective. For in laughter, the soul finds its sanity, and through that sanity, its strength to rise again.