“They just don’t get Northeast humor,” my friend and fellow New Yorker, Bad Michael, was saying. I’d been grumbling at the coffee stand about the starchiness of a couple of recent letters to the editor about my humor column — the one on road paving.

I saw a light come on in his eyes: “I’ve got it!”

Michael with an idea is like your mother-in-law standing on a precipice and believing she can fly: a terrifying yet potentially entertaining prospect.

“Write a column on the difference between Northeast and Northwest humor!”

I waited for this flare to fizzle. It took only a second.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “There isn’t any Northwest humor.”

The Gods should smite me where I stand for admitting it, but Michael was right: The Northwest is not a funny place. This, I am convinced, is principally because of volcanoes. Volcanoes are not funny, and we have way too many of them on our doorstep. Puts a sort of damper on things, you know?

So here’s a test: name me one — just one — internationally acclaimed Seattle humorist. That’s okay; I can wait (sound of tuneless humming).

Exactly. Whereas the list of brilliant Northeast humorists and stand-up comics is nearly infinite, starting with the Kings of Comedy themselves: Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Rodney Dangerfield, Henny Youngman, Sid Caesar, Alan King, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, George Burns, Don Rickles, Lenny Bruce, Jackie Vernon, Jonathan Winters and on and on. Most of these characters (and, boy, were they!) cut their teeth in the Borscht Belt, a string of cavernous summer hotels in the Catskill Mountains north of New York City that catered to immigrants, mostly Jewish, from Eastern Europe (thus, the borscht). If you were Jewish from Eastern Europe, laughing was way better than crying.

Aristotle and Socrates had an entire routine they used to do way back when on the nature of humor. This is true: They were like the Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks of their age.

And over the centuries we’ve come to understand humor’s purpose — besides laughter, of course: Humor is something human beings do to cope with the ridiculous, ludicrous, absurd, idiotic realities of being alive in the world. It requires courage, creativity and a degree of craziness.

Humor is diving from the high board into the shallow end of the pool while attempting to execute perfectly a reverse with a twist … knowing you’re going to bonk your head no matter what. Humor is an act of desperate sanity in an insane world.

The essential elements of humor are surprise, incongruity, exaggeration and self-deprecation. Letters to the editor claiming otherwise notwithstanding, I have never “poked fun” at anyone other than myself (a fertile field) and, of course, Bad Michael, who richly deserves it.

If you make fun of someone else, it’s not funny; if you make fun of yourself, people will laugh. Why? Because they can see themselves in you, see the truth in the existential struggle, see the humor in their own daily lives.

Much about funniness also depends on timing the surprise: You follow a perfectly unremarkable narrative with a pause and a punchline. Take this Rodney Dangerfield classic: “My wife and I were happy for 20 years … then we met.” He’s gotcha. Rim shot.

We laugh at a line like that because we know in our heart of hearts none of us is a bargain and the only way we, or partners, or friends, and our children will get by is because we can laugh at ourselves.

Another tool of humor is exaggeration. When someone — say, a columnist — writes that “no new paving has been done in New York City since the Revolutionary War,” we’re not to take this literally. The exaggeration is meant to convey a deeper truth, which is that cities chronically underfund basic infrastructure.

And in any humor column, there are word choices that are specifically designed to signal, by their inherent silliness, an absence of seriousness. Some words, let’s just admit it, are funny in and of themselves.

Banana is a funny word. Apple is not (especially in this state).

Shrubbery is a much funnier word than bushes.

Zillions is a funny word because everyone knows it isn’t real, so that if, say, a columnist uses a phrase like, “I know how they’re going to pay for all that new asphalt … the county will collect zillions in new speeding tickets,” we know — well, most of us do — that it’s not a serious assertion. Chip seal is funny because of all its inherent incongruities, but, thanks to the county roads people, we now have its formal moniker, bituminous surface treatment, which, in addition to taking eight syllables to say “chip seal,” is just flat-out hilarious.

I mean, come on: When was the last time you used the word bituminous in a sentence?

— Will North is a Vashon novelist. His next novel is set on the Island.