The thing I enjoy most about William F. Buckley, Jr's writing is the sense of humor.  A good sense of humor so often displays an individual's comfort with life.  We are dealt fortune and disaster and humor often reconciles us to both.

Theater and music critic, Terry Teachout, attended the recent Mass for the repose of the soul of William F. Buckley, Jr. and appropriately remembers the humor of Buckley during the communion:

"The only thing that made my inner critic smile wryly was the performance during communion of the Adagio in G Minor long attributed to Albinoni but in fact woven out of whole cloth by one Remo Giazotto. It is a preposterously operatic piece of spurious yard goods, and to hear it played on the organ with all stops pulled put me in mind of something Bill wrote after attending a Virgil Fox recital many years ago:

At one point during a prelude, I am tempted to rise solemnly, commandeer a shotgun, and advise Fox, preferably in imperious German, if only I could learn German in time to consummate the fantasy, that if he does not release the goddam vox humana, which is oohing-ahing-eeing the music where Bach clearly intended something closer to a bel canto, I shall simply have to blow his head off.

That was the Bill Buckley I knew, whip-smart and impishly outrageous, the same man that David Remnick had in mind when he described Bill as having 'the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat.'"

More:

"Henry Kissinger, who eulogized him this morning, alluded to that side of Bill's personality when he remarked that Bill 'was vouchsafed a little miracle: to enjoy so much what was compelled by inner necessity.' I couldn't have put it better. Bill worked fearfully hard and was deadly serious about what he believed, but he extracted self-evident enjoyment from everything he did, and you couldn't be in his presence for more than a minute or two without responding to his joie de vivre."