Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
insanity. In many of its aspects it resembles a fixed idea. But neither
insanity in general, nor fixed ideas in particular, are provocative of
laughter: they are diseases, and arouse our pity.
Laughter, as we have seen, is incompatible with emotion. If there
exists a madness that is laughable, it can only be one compatible with
the general health of the mind,--a sane type of madness, one might say.
Now, there is a sane state of the mind that resembles madness in every
respect, in which we find the same associations of ideas as we do in
lunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed idea. This state is that
of dreams. So either our analysis is incorrect, or it must be capable
of being stated in the following theorem: Comic absurdity is of the
same nature as that of dreams.
The behaviour of the intellect in a dream is exactly what we have just
been describing. The mind, enamoured of itself, now seeks in the outer
world nothing more than a pretext for realising its imaginations. A
confused murmur of sounds still reaches the ear, colours enter the
field of vision, the senses are not completely shut in. But the
dreamer, instead of appealing to the whole of his recollections for the
interpretation of what his senses perceive, makes use of what he
perceives to give substance to the particular recollection he favours:
thus, according to the mood of the dreamer and the idea that fills his
imagination at the time, a gust of wind blowing down the chimney
becomes the howl of a wild beast or a tuneful melody. Such is the
ordinary mechanism of illusion in dreams.
Now, if comic illusion is similar to dream illusion, if the logic of
the comic is the logic of dreams, we may expect to discover in the
logic of the laughable all the peculiarities of dream logic. Here,
again, we shall find an illustration of the law with which we are well
acquainted: given one form of the laughable, other forms that are
lacking in the same comic essence become laughable from their outward
resemblance to the first. Indeed, it is not difficult to see that any
PLAY OF IDEAS may afford us amusement if only it bring back to mind,
more or less distinctly, the play of dreamland.
We shall first call attention to a certain general relaxation of the
rules of reasoning. The reasonings at which we laugh are those we know
to be false, but which we might accept as true were we to hear them in
a dream. They counterfeit true reasoning just sufficiently to deceive a
mind dropping off to sleep. There is still an element of logic in them,
if you will, but it is a logic lacking in tension and, for that very
reason, affording us relief from intellectual effort. Many "witticisms"
are reasonings of this kind, considerably abridged reasonings, of which
we are given only the beginning and the end. Such play upon ideas
evolves in the direction of a play upon words in proportion as the
relations set up between the ideas become more superficial: gradually
we come to take no account of the meaning of the words we hear, but
only of their sound. It might be instructive to compare with dreams
certain comic scenes in which one of the characters systematically
repeats in a nonsensical fashion what another character whispers in his
ear. If you fall asleep with people talking round you, you sometimes
find that what they say gradually becomes devoid of meaning, that the
sounds get distorted, as it were, and recombine in a haphazard fashion
to form in your mind the strangest of meanings, and that you are
reproducing between yourself and the different speakers the scene
between Petit-Jean and The Prompter. [Footnote: Les Plaideurs (Racine).]
There are also COMIC OBSESSIONS that seem to bear a great resemblance
to dream obsessions. Who has not had the experience of seeing the same
image appear in several successive dreams, assuming a plausible meaning
in each of them, whereas these dreams had no other point in common.
Effects of repetition sometimes present this special form on the stage
or in fiction: some of them, in fact, sound as though they belonged to
a dream. It may be the same with the burden of many a song: it
persistently recurs, always unchanged, at the end of every verse, each
time with a different meaning.
Not infrequently do we notice in dreams a particular CRESCENDO, a weird
effect that grows more pronounced as we proceed. The first concession
extorted from reason introduces a second; and this one, another of a
more serious nature; and so on till the crowning absurdity is reached.
Now, this progress towards the absurd produces on the dreamer a very
peculiar sensation. Such is probably the experience of the tippler when
he feels himself pleasantly drifting into a state of blankness in which
neither reason nor propriety has any meaning for him. Now, consider
whether some of Moliere's plays would not produce the same sensation:
for instance, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, which, after beginning almost
reasonably, develops into a sequence of all sorts of absurdities.
Consider also the Bourgeois gentilhomme, where the different characters
seem to allow themselves to be caught up in a very whirlwind of madness
as the play proceeds. "If it is possible to find a man more completely
mad, I will go and publish it in Rome." This sentence, which warns us
that the play is over, rouses us from the increasingly extravagant
dream into which, along with M. Jourdain, we have been sinking.
But, above all, there is a special madness that is peculiar to dreams.
There are certain special contradictions so natural to the imagination
of a dreamer, and so absurd to the reason of a man wide-awake, that it
would be impossible to give a full and correct idea of their nature to
anyone who had not experienced them. We allude to the strange fusion
that a dream often effects between two persons who henceforth form only
one and yet remain distinct. Generally one of these is the dreamer
himself. He feels he has not ceased to be what he is; yet he has become
someone else. He is himself, and not himself. He hears himself speak
and sees himself act, but he feels that some other "he" has borrowed
his body and stolen his voice. Or perhaps he is conscious of speaking
and acting as usual, but he speaks of himself as a stranger with whom
he has nothing in common; he has stepped out of his own self. Does it
not seem as though we found this same extraordinary confusion in many a
comic scene? I am not speaking of Amphitryon, in which play the
confusion is perhaps suggested to the mind of the spectator, though the
bulk of the comic effect proceeds rather from what we have already
called a "reciprocal interference of two series." I am speaking of the
extravagant and comic reasonings in which we really meet with this
confusion in its pure form, though it requires some looking into to
pick it out. For instance, listen to Mark Twain's replies to the
reporter who called to interview him:
QUESTION. Isn't that a brother of yours? ANSWER. Oh! yes, yes, yes! Now
you remind me of it, that WAS a brother of mine. That's William--BILL
we called him. Poor old Bill!
Q. Why? Is he dead, then? A. Ah! well, I suppose so. We never could
tell. There was a great mystery about it.
Q. That is sad, very sad. He disappeared, then? A. Well, yes, in a sort
of general way. We buried him.
Q. BURIED him! BURIED him, without knowing whether he was dead or not?
A. Oh no! Not that. He was dead enough.
Q. Well, I confess that I can't understand this. If you buried him, and
you knew he was dead--A. No! no! We only thought he was.
Q. Oh, I see! He came to life again? A. I bet he didn't.
Q. Well, I never heard anything like this. SOMEBODY was dead. SOMEBODY
was buried. Now, where was the mystery? A. Ah! that's just it! That's
it exactly. You see, we were twins,--defunct and I,--and we got mixed
in the bath-tub when we were only two weeks old, and one of us was
drowned. But we didn't know which. Some think it was Bill. Some think
it was me.
Q. Well, that is remarkable. What do YOU think? A. Goodness knows! I
would give whole worlds to know. This solemn, this awful tragedy has
cast a gloom over my whole life. But I will tell you a secret now,
which I have never revealed to any creature before. One of us had a
peculiar mark,--a large mole on the back of his left hand: that was ME.
THAT CHILD WAS THE ONE THAT WAS DROWNED! ... etc., etc.
A close examination will show us that the absurdity of this dialogue is
by no means an absurdity of an ordinary type. It would disappear were
not the speaker himself one of the twins in the story. It results
entirely from the fact that Mark Twain asserts he is one of these
twins, whilst all the time he talks as though he were a third person
who tells the tale. In many of our dreams we adopt exactly the same
method.
V
Regarded from this latter point of view, the comic seems to show itself
in a form somewhat different from the one we lately attributed to it.
Up to this point, we have regarded laughter as first and foremost a
means of correction. If you take the series of comic varieties and
isolate the predominant types at long intervals, you will find that all
the intervening varieties borrow their comic quality from their
resemblance to these types, and that the types themselves are so many
models of impertinence with regard to society. To these impertinences
society retorts by laughter, an even greater impertinence. So evidently
there is nothing very benevolent in laughter. It seems rather inclined
to return evil for evil.
But this is not what we are immediately struck by in our first
impression of the laughable. The comic character is often one with
whom, to begin with, our mind, or rather our body, sympathises. By this
is meant that we put ourselves for a very short time in his place,
adopt his gestures, words, arid actions, and, if amused by anything
laughable in him, invite him, in imagination, to share his amusement
with us; in fact, we treat him first as a playmate. So, in the laugher
we find a "hail-fellow-well-met" spirit--as far, at least, as
appearances go--which it would be wrong of us not to take into
consideration. In particular, there is in laughter a movement of
relaxation which has often been noticed, and the reason of which we
must try to discover. Nowhere is this impression more noticeable than
in the last few examples. In them, indeed, we shall find its
explanation.
When the comic character automatically follows up his idea, he
ultimately thinks, speaks and acts as though he were dreaming. Now, a
dream is a relaxation. To remain in touch with things and men, to see
nothing but what is existent and think nothing but what is consistent,
demands a continuous effort of intellectual tension. This effort is
common sense. And to remain sensible is, indeed, to remain at work. But
to detach oneself from things and yet continue to perceive images, to
break away from logic and yet continue to string together ideas, is to
indulge in play or, if you prefer, in dolce far niente. So, comic
absurdity gives us from the outset the impression of playing with
ideas. Our first impulse is to join in the game. That relieves us from
the strain of thinking. Now, the same might be said of the other forms
of the laughable. Deep-rooted in the comic, there is always a tendency,
we said, to take the line of least resistance, generally that of habit.
The comic character no longer tries to be ceaselessly adapting and
readapting himself to the society of which he is a member. He slackens
in the attention that is due to life. He more or less resembles the
absentminded. Maybe his will is here even more concerned than his
intellect, and there is not so much a want of attention as a lack of
tension; still, in some way or another, he is absent, away from his