Levity Humor Telling Aunt Manner Lacking Seriousness Literally

Levity literally means "lightness," and it's often an attempt to inject some lightness or humor into an otherwise somber situation. Telling your Aunt Edna a joke while she recuperates from a skiing accident could provide the levity needed to brighten her mood. Yet levity is often used to describe humor that's not appropriate to the occasion, like telling your Aunt the joke, "Two corpses walk into a bar..." after her husband has just died.