I am Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
The narcissist has a sense of humor, but he rarely engages in self-directed, self-deprecating humor. If he does, he expects to be contradicted, rebuked, and rebuffed by his listeners. He expects to be told, come on, you are actually quite handsome, or brilliant, or perfect. He expects to be commended or admired for his courage, for his wit, and intellectual acerbity.
I envy your ability to laugh at yourself, he expects people to say.
As everything else in the narcissist's life, his sense of humor is deployed in the interminable pursuit of narcissistic supply.
Yet to obtain narcissistic supply, one must be taken seriously, and to be taken seriously, one must be the first one to take oneself seriously.
Hence the gravity with which the narcissist contemplates himself and his life.
This lack of levity and perspective and proportion characterize the narcissist and set him apart. The narcissist firmly believes that he is unique, that he has a mission to fulfill, a destined life.
The narcissist's biography is part of mankind's legacy, spun by a cosmic plot which constantly thickens. Such a life deserves only the most serious consideration. It is not a laughing matter.
Moreover, every particle of the narcissist's existence, every action or inaction, every utterance, creation, composition, indeed every thought, are bathed in this universal significance.
The narcissist treads the ideal paths of glory, achievement, affection and brilliance. It is all part of a design, a pattern, a plot, which inexorably leads the narcissist on to the fulfillment of his task.
The narcissist may subscribe to a religion, to a belief or to an ideology in his effort to understand the source of this ubiquitous conviction of uniqueness. He may attribute his sense of direction to God, to history, to society, to culture, to a calling, to his profession, to a value system, but he always does it with a straight face and with dead earnestness.
And because to the narcissist the part is a reflection of the whole, he tends to generalize, to resort to stereotypes, to induct, to learn about the whole from the detail, to exaggerate, finally, to pathologically lie to himself and to others.
This self-importance, this belief in a grand design, in an all-embracing and all-pervasive pattern in which the narcissist is enmeshed, these make him an easy prey to all manner of logical fallacies and conartistry.
Despite his avowed and proudly expressed rationality, the narcissist is besieged by superstition and prejudice. Above all, he is a captive of the false conviction that his uniqueness destined him to fulfill a mission of cosmic significance.
All these make the narcissist a volatile person, not merely mercurial, but fluctuating, histrionic, unreliable and disproportional.
That which has cosmic implications calls for cosmic reactions. A person with an inflated sense of self-importance reacts with exaggeration to threats, greatly inflated by his imagination and by his personal mythology.
On the narcissist's cosmic scale, the daily vagaries of life, the mundane, the pedestrian, the routine, they are not important, they are even damagingly distracting. This is the source of his feeling of exceptional entitlement.
Surely, engaged as he is in benefiting humanity through the exercise of his unique faculties, he deserves some special treatment, is it not?
This is the source of the narcissist's virulent swings between opposite behavior patterns and between devaluation and idealization of others.
To the narcissist, every minor development is nothing less than a fortuitous omen. Every adversity is a conspiracy to offset his progress. Every setback and apocalyptic calamity, every irritation, the cause for outlandish outbursts of rage.
The narcissist is a man of extremes and only of extremes. He may learn to efficiently suppress or hide his true feelings and reactions, but never for long.
In the most inappropriate and inopportune moments, you can count on the narcissist to explode like a wrongly wound time bomb.
And in between eruptions, the narcissistic volcano, daydreams, indulges in delusions, plans his victories over an increasingly hostile and alienated environment.
Gradually, the narcissist becomes paranoid, aloof, detached, and disociative.
You must admit, in such a state of mind, there is not much room for a sense of humor.