Today’s Archive Dive is from Dec. 18, 2013, when I talked about a necessary ingredient in humor: cruelty.

A while ago, I read an angry letter to the editor about a syndicated comic strip that drew the ire of a reader (who made the ubiquitous subscription-cancelation threat). The comic was seen to be “insulting and degrading.”

And, like it does every time I see a work of humor attacked for its cruelty, I had to laugh… nervously.

Let me put it in a way that best fits this site: Cruelty is the yellow impurity in the Green Lantern ring of Humor…

Read the entire post and comment there.