Why have Mardi Gras?

"If there is any world left in which human beings still laugh and still, even on rare occasions, have fun, there will be a Mardi Gras ... it will live through whatever catastrophes occur, as it survived the perishing of Greece, the destruction of Rome, the centuries of pain and plague we call the Middle Ages, the perilous journey to the end of the earth that turned out to be America, and all the wars. Men cease to laugh only when they are very ill or when they have become beasts.... That is why Mardi Gras is not a trivial matter but a very important one."

— Robert Tallant, Mardi Gras ... As It Was (1947). Quoted in The Times Picayune, p. A-12 (Feb. 19, 2006).