It may, however, be suggested that the reason for this special honor is because, paradoxically, Joseph did not appear to be a real tzaddik. There can be little doubt that at the time of his reign over Egypt, he must have been seen as a ruthless person who had little reluctance to make the lives of his fellow men unbearable, particularly those of his brothers, his father and the entire Egyptian population. Joseph's life is the epitome of the complications of human existence in the extreme. It is a life in which human conditions are far from ideal. There are no black and white choices in which it is easy to take a stand and where the good guys and the bad ones are clearly identified.
Every choice includes a complex mixture of good and bad.
Even with best intentions one sometimes cannot help hurting those one really loves the most and doing favors to those who are corrupt. Reading the story, one wonders what must have gone through Joseph's mind and heart when he took a hard stand on the people of Egypt by buying up everything that they owned till in the end he made the whole population enslaved to Pharaoh without any private possessions. This was nothing less than a population expulsion, one of the worst human experiences. Commentators explain that this was the only way he was able to save the country from even greater disasters and in fact the only way to revive the economy. Still, he must have been greatly disturbed to bring about such upheaval in the nation.