I don't know. Seems a little unfocused and a whole lot of rationalizing. I don't think he proved his premise.
Personally I think comedy exists to make life easier. Because life is cruel and violent and short and laughter is the good that helps us recognize the bad.
You can hope for more than that but you can't expect it and if you get less than that then you either aren't funny or haven't found your audience.
And comedy is a pretty black art. There really is no way to make anyone laugh without someone (even unknowingly) or something becoming the victim. That is the reason "why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side" isn't funny.This is also the reason "Why did the baby cross the road? Because it was stapled to the chicken," is.
While the idea of a real baby being stapled to an animal and dragged across a road is horrible and shocking. If it were done in reality the perpetrators would be scorned and imprisoned and rightly so.
But take a normally mundane statement without humor and juxtapose it with child maiming and danger and you get comedic gold. Not because we think the actuality of a baby being stapled to a chicken funny, but because the reality of it is, somewhere, at some point, life in general is so cruel that something similar has probably happened. And we want to be able to laugh at that horror. We need to. Otherwise we would spend all of our days weeping and decrying the evil that is mankind. Self destruction would most likely follow.
Comedy is complicated and its motivations are not easily understood or quantified. That's why it took both Heinlein's Valentine Micheal Smith and Roddenberry's Data a long time to grasp.
