For years, women have told me, “I want a man with a good sense of humor.” My response has usually been, “Well, you’re certainly high-maintenance. I don’t think this is going to work.” No wonder I’m still single. Or maybe I just need to keep my irony in check and learn to smile a bit more.

Existentialism is said to be all about “the death of God,” the meaninglessness of human life, and the anxiety those provoke. It is in the face of such anxiety that one needs the courage to make meanings, to be oneself. The theme gets dutifully traced back to Søren Kierkegaard and [Friedrich] Nietzsche, and forward through Martin Heidegger, [Albert] Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Tillich, and Viktor Frankl, always with a touch of heroism but surrounded by the darkness of despair and ultimate meaninglessness.

In the early years of existentialism in postwar Europe, the emphasis was indeed on gloom and hopelessness. The books and articles that made the biggest splash—William Barrett’s Irrational Man, for instance—were those that bemoaned the death of God and the despair and meaninglessness that are implied by that cosmic absence. That was challenged in the sixties by the celebrations of hipness in the United States at the hands of Norman Mailer, in Advertisements for Myself, and some of the Beats. The heady optimism that ruled America in those years leavened the Old World gloom and turned meaninglessness into a challenge, recasting the death of God into a sense of liberation. Even in Europe, existentialism came to present itself as a positive philosophy, a philosophy of hope, in works like Camus’s essay “The Rebel” and Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism.”