levity

Noun

levity (usually uncountable, plural levities)

1. (usually) A lightness of manner or speech, frivolity; flippancy; a lack of appropriate seriousness; an inclination to make a joke of serious matters.
   • An attempt to inject a little levity into the proceedings.

   Antonyms:

   gravity

2. (obsolete, usually) A lack of steadiness.
3. (usually) The state or quality of being light, buoyancy.
   • Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity […]1925, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, published 1953, →ISBN
   • […]it would really seem as if there was something nomadic in our natures, a principle of levity and restlessness […]1838, Robert Montgomery Bird, Peter Pilgrim
4. (countable, usually) A lighthearted or frivolous act.
   • For though it be something wonderful to tell that any should have hearts so hardened, in the midst of such a calamity, as to rob and steal, yet certain it is that all sorts of villainies, and even levities and debaucheries, were then practiced in the town as openly as ever: I will not say quite as...1665, Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, Gutenberg
   • […] or do the people joy less than common in their levities?"1872, J. Fenimore Cooper, The Bravo