Although, I think it’s important to recognize, also, that Dante can use humor in his depiction of the supernatural realms only because he is, in fact, depicting them, and is not delivering them to us as they are, in their reality. Which of course would be impossible. Insofar as the supernatural realms (assuming a reader would give them credence) cannot be experienced the same way that we experience natural phenomena, here in our mortal lives, through the elapsing of time, and with our sense organs. I would even go so far as to say he is obliged to use humor, at least now and then. Otherwise he would alienate his readers, and would not succeed artistically. For there is, in The Divine Comedy, an interesting paradox, that can be described, I think, like this: humor is a relief from monotony, and perhaps even from pain, and so it would be absent from Hell (as well as from Heaven, although for inverse reasons), as Hell is a state of eternal torment. And yet certain genres of art cannot function without humor, at least not when they are representational (as opposed to abstract). For, by setting themselves up as representations of human experience, they take on the mimetic responsibility of including in their expression all that is within the human range. And so Dante, the artist, finds himself in the strange position of attempting to convince us of the reality of a place by a technique whose effect could never be felt in that place.