Of course, it isn’t humor alone that is a paradoxical part of Dante’s poem, but the very poem itself. For, except for a few cantos near the beginning, the entire ‘Comedy’ takes place in what we call an ‘afterlife.’ Which, being eternal, as opposed to temporal, would function not so much as a location, but as a state, or a condition. So that, though we might retain our individuality there, or our identity as particular souls, we likely would not experience that condition bodily. At least not in the way that we know our bodies now, as organisms that are subject to entropy, and to the constraints of space and time. Therefore, what Dante is doing is attempting to convey the reality of the afterlife in the only way we can comprehend it. And yet, in doing so, he must distort the very nature of that reality. Which isn’t to say that he misrepresents it.