Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
up to the loftiest forms of humour and irony, that we shall forego the
attempt to make out a complete list. Having stated the rule, we will
simply, here and there, verify its main applications.
In the first place, we may distinguish two keys at the extreme ends of
the scale, the solemn and the familiar. The most obvious effects are
obtained by merely transposing the one into the other, which thus
provides us with two opposite currents of comic fancy.
Transpose the solemn into the familiar and the result is parody. The
effect of parody, thus defined, extends to instances in which the idea
expressed in familiar terms is one that, if only in deference to
custom, ought to be pitched in another key. Take as an example the
following description of the dawn, quoted by Jean Paul Richter: "The
sky was beginning to change from black to red, like a lobster being
boiled." Note that the expression of old-world matters in terms of
modern life produces the same effect, by reason of the halo of poetry
which surrounds classical antiquity.
It is doubtless the comic in parody that has suggested to some
philosophers, and in particular to Alexander Bain, the idea of defining
the comic, in general, as a species of DEGRADATION. They describe the
laughable as causing something to appear mean that was formerly
dignified. But if our analysis is correct, degradation is only one form
of transposition, and transposition itself only one of the means of
obtaining laughter. There is a host of others, and the source of
laughter must be sought for much further back. Moreover, without going
so far, we see that while the transposition from solemn to trivial,
from better to worse, is comic, the inverse transposition may be even
more so.
It is met with as often as the other, and, apparently, we may
distinguish two main forms of it, according as it refers to the
PHYSICAL DIMENSIONS of an object or to its MORAL VALUE.
To speak of small things as though they were large is, in a general
way, TO EXAGGERATE. Exaggeration is always comic when prolonged, and
especially when systematic; then, indeed, it appears as one method of
transposition. It excites so much laughter that some writers have been
led to define the comic as exaggeration, just as others have defined it
as degradation. As a matter of fact, exaggeration, like degradation, is
only one form of one kind of the comic. Still, it is a very striking
form. It has given birth to the mock-heroic poem, a rather
old-fashioned device, I admit, though traces of it are still to be
found in persons inclined to exaggerate methodically. It might often be
said of braggadocio that it is its mock-heroic aspect which makes us
laugh.
Far more artificial, but also far more refined, is the transposition
upwards from below when applied to the moral value of things, not to
their physical dimensions. To express in reputable language some
disreputable idea, to take some scandalous situation, some low-class
calling or disgraceful behaviour, and describe them in terms of the
utmost "RESPECTABILITY," is generally comic. The English word is here
purposely employed, as the practice itself is characteristically
English. Many instances of it may be found in Dickens and Thackeray,
and in English literature generally. Let us remark, in passing, that
the intensity of the effect does not here depend on its length. A word
is sometimes sufficient, provided it gives us a glimpse of an entire
system of transposition accepted in certain social circles and reveals,
as it were, a moral organisation of immorality. Take the following
remark made by an official to one of his subordinates in a novel of
Gogol's, "Your peculations are too extensive for an official of your
rank."
Summing up the foregoing, then, there are two extreme terms of
comparison, the very large and the very small, the best and the worst,
between which transposition may be effected in one direction or the
other. Now, if the interval be gradually narrowed, the contrast between
the terms obtained will be less and less violent, and the varieties of
comic transposition more and more subtle.
The most common of these contrasts is perhaps that between the real and
the ideal, between what is and what ought to be. Here again
transposition may take place in either direction. Sometimes we state
what ought to be done, and pretend to believe that this is just what is
actually being done; then we have IRONY. Sometimes, on the contrary, we
describe with scrupulous minuteness what is being done, and pretend to
believe that this is just what ought to be done; such is often the
method of HUMOUR. Humour, thus denned, is the counterpart of irony.
Both are forms of satire, but irony is oratorical in its nature, whilst
humour partakes of the scientific. Irony is emphasised the higher we
allow ourselves to be uplifted by the idea of the good that ought to
be: thus irony may grow so hot within us that it becomes a kind of
high-pressure eloquence. On the other hand, humour is the more
emphasised the deeper we go down into an evil that actually is, in
order t o set down its details in the most cold-blooded indifference.
Several authors, Jean Paul amongst them, have noticed that humour
delights in concrete terms, technical details, definite facts. If our
analysis is correct, this is not an accidental trait of humour, it is
its very essence. A humorist is a moralist disguised as a scientist,
something like an anatomist who practises dissection with the sole
object of filling us with disgust; so that humour, in the restricted
sense in which we are here regarding the word, is really a
transposition from the moral to the scientific.
By still further curtailing the interval between the terms transposed,
we may now obtain more and more specialised types of comic
transpositions. Thus, certain professions have a technical vocabulary:
what a wealth of laughable results have been obtained by transposing
the ideas of everyday life into this professional jargon! Equally comic
is the extension of business phraseology to the social relations of
life,--for instance, the phrase of one of Labiche's characters in
allusion to an invitation he has received, "Your kindness of the third
ult.," thus transposing the commercial formula, "Your favour of the
third instant." This class of the comic, moreover, may attain a special
profundity of its own when it discloses not merely a professional
practice, but a fault in character. Recall to mind the scenes in the
Faux Bonshommes and the Famille Benoiton, where marriage is dealt with
as a business affair, and matters of sentiment are set down in strictly
commercial language.
Here, however, we reach the point at which peculiarities of language
really express peculiarities of character, a closer investigation of
which we must hold over to the next chapter. Thus, as might have been
expected and may be seen from the foregoing, the comic in words follows
closely on the comic in situation and is finally merged, along with the
latter, in the comic in character. Language only attains laughable
results because it is a human product, modelled as exactly as possible
on the forms of the human mind. We feel it contains some living element
of our own life; and if this life of language were complete and
perfect, if there were nothing stereotype in it, if, in short, language
were an absolutely unified organism incapable of being split up into
independent organisms, it would evade the comic as would a soul whose
life was one harmonious whole, unruffled as the calm surface of a
peaceful lake. There is no pool, however, which has not some dead
leaves floating on its surface, no human soul upon which there do not
settle habits that make it rigid against itself by making it rigid
against others, no language, in short, so subtle and instinct with
life, so fully alert in each of its parts as to eliminate the
ready-made and oppose the mechanical operations of inversion,
transposition, etc., which one would fain perform upon it as on some
lifeless thing. The rigid, the ready--made, the mechanical, in contrast
with the supple, the ever-changing and the living, absentmindedness in
contrast with attention, in a word, automatism in contrast with free
activity, such are the defects that laughter singles out and would fain
correct. We appealed to this idea to give us light at the outset, when
starting upon the analysis of the ludicrous. We have seen it shining at
every decisive turning in our road. With its help, we shall now enter
upon a more important investigation, one that will, we hope, be more
instructive. We purpose, in short, studying comic characters, or rather
determining the essential conditions of comedy in character, while
endeavouring to bring it about that this study may contribute to a
better understanding of the real nature of art and the general relation
between art and life.
CHAPTER III
THE COMIC IN CHARACTER
I
We have followed the comic along many of its winding channels in an
endeavour to discover how it percolates into a form, an attitude, or a
gesture; a situation, an action, or an expression. The analysis of
comic CHARACTERS has now brought us to the most important part of our
task. It would also be the most difficult, had we yielded to the
temptation of defining the laughable by a few striking--and
consequently obvious--examples; for then, in proportion as we advanced
towards the loftiest manifestations of the comic, we should have found
the facts slipping between the over-wide meshes of the definition
intended to retain them. But, as a matter of fact, we have followed the
opposite plan, by throwing light on the subject from above. Convinced
that laughter has a social meaning and import, that the comic
expresses, above all else, a special lack of adaptability to society,
and that, in short, there is nothing comic apart from man, we have made
man and character generally our main objective. Our chief difficulty,
therefore, has lain in explaining how we come to laugh at anything else
than character, and by what subtle processes of fertilisation,
combination or amalgamation, the comic can worm its way into a mere
movement, an impersonal situation, or an independent phrase. This is
what we have done so far. We started with the pure metal, and all our
endeavours have been directed solely towards reconstructing the ore. It
is the metal itself we are now about to study. Nothing could be easier,
for this time we have a simple element to deal with. Let us examine it
closely and see how it reacts upon everything else.
There are moods, we said, which move us as soon us as soon as we
perceive them, joys and sorrows with which we sympathise, passions and
vices which call forth painful astonishment, terror or pity, in the
beholder; in short, sentiments that are prolonged in sentimental
overtones from mind to mind. All this concerns the essentials of life.
All this is serious, at times even tragic. Comedy can only begin at the
point where our neighbour's personality ceases to affect us. It begins,
in fact, with what might be called a growing callousness to social
life. Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own way
without troubling himself about getting into touch with the rest of his
fellow-beings. It is the part of laughter to reprove his
absentmindedness and wake him out of his dream. If it is permissible to
compare important things with trivial ones, we would call to mind what
happens when a youth enters one of our military academies. After
getting through the dreaded ordeal of the examination, he finds the has
other ordeals to face, which his seniors have arranged with the object
of fitting him for the new life he is entering upon, or, as they say,
of "breaking him into harness." Every small society that forms within