People
The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
— Samuel Beckett ‧ Waiting for Godot
Behind the line May contain spoilers.
Our reading
An editorial interpretation.
Here the speaker treats sorrow and laughter like fixed quantities, a kind of cosmic accounting. Whenever one person starts crying, someone else somewhere stops, so the total never changes. Then it adds that laughter works the same way, which is a bleakly funny, balanced view of the world.
Context reviewed