It is now time to acquaint ourselves with a few of the characteristics of humour. Like jokes and the comic, humour has something liberating about it; but it also has something of grandeur and elevation, which is lacking in the other two ways of obtaining pleasure from intellectual activity. The grandeur in it clearly lies in the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability. The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure. This last feature is a quite essential element of humour (Freud 162).
Freud, Sigmund. “Humor.“ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Translated by James Strachey, vol. 21, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1961, pp. 160-66.