This interview with Simon Critchley is worth your time. If you're busy, here's a good excerpt:

Nietzsche's response to nihilism is the doctrine of eternal return. You could read that in a cosmological way, as a belief that the universe is cyclical and is going to recur. Or, as you hinted, Vico's notion of cycles of history could be seen as signalled. I think that's all window dressing, though; I don't think that's what Nietzsche means. For him, eternal return is much more of a moral doctrine.
There's a story told by the poet Heine about Kant walking on the heath with his servant just after writing the first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, in which he takes God away. He looks at his servant and suddenly feels so sorry for him because he's taken God away from him that he writes a second Critique, just to give God back. The essential thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason is that traditional metaphysics, God, freedom and immortality, is cognitively meaningless. We cannot know whether God exists, whether the soul is immortal and so on. That's the First Critique. Then in the Second Kant says: But we can still maintain the idea of God, or immortality of the soul as a postulate, a postulate of practical reason. So although I cannot know whether God exists, I can still act as if he did, and that can orientate my ethical activity.
Nietzsche ups the ante and takes it a stage further. He says: Well, this is ridiculous. What would it be to fully affirm the fact that God doesn't exist? To fully affirm the complete meaninglessness of the universe? And to be able to do that again and again and again. If you're capable of that thought, of affirming that this universe is not for us, that we're just here by sheer chance, and you can do that again and again, then you're equal to the force of eternal return. It's a sort of moral test.

This part is also interesting:

If I could go back to what I was saying about Nietzsche: what people get excited about in his work is this notion of affirmation: an affirmation in relation to death. I can affirm the meaninglessness of the universe and the ultimate meaninglessness of my own life, and heroically assume that. There's something almost disgusting about that thought after the holocaust, it seems to me. Adorno puts his finger on this quite well in the final part of Negative Dialectic. He's concerned with after Auschwitz. He says that a new categorical imperative has imposed itself on humankind: not to let Auschwitz repeat itself, and not to hand Hitler posthumous victories. He goes on to say that the situation of the death camps is best described not by descriptions of them, but by, for example, the work of Beckett. Why? Because it doesn't say anything about them; it doesn't attempt to represent what took place.

Now here is another interview with Critchley on humor, from a later date i think.

I begin from the assumption that modernity is defined by the impossibility of any metaphysical belief in a deity. That's where I begin from and that is axiomatic for me. It means that if I had a religious experience I would stop doing philosophy: philosophy for me is essentially atheistic.

Now, it's important to keep the metaphysical "death of God" separate the question of whether God exists or not, but even so I found this to be a pretty interesting statement because I've always thought religious experiences to be a key motivator of philosophy in the first place. Wouldn't the felt presence of God necessarily act just like the nothingness of existentialism, or the anxiety of Heidegger. God, whether he exists or not, seems to represent a radical Otherness from this world that threatens and calls it into question.