Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
however, have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the result
being that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it out all
covered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a solid chair
he finds himself sprawling on the floor, in a word his actions are all
topsy-turvy or mere beating the air, while in every case the effect is
invariably one of momentum. Habit has given the impulse: what was
wanted was to check the movement or deflect it. He did nothing of the
sort, but continued like a machine in the same straight line. The
victim, then, of a practical joke is in a position similar to that of a
runner who falls,--he is comic for the same reason. The laughable
element in both cases consists of a certain MECHANICAL INELASTICITY,
just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the
living pliableness of a human being. The only difference in the two
cases is that the former happened of itself, whilst the latter was
obtained artificially. In the first instance, the passer-by does
nothing but look on, but in the second the mischievous wag intervenes.
All the same, in both cases the result has been brought about by an
external circumstance. The comic is therefore accidental: it remains,
so to speak, in superficial contact with the person. How is it to
penetrate within? The necessary conditions will be fulfilled when
mechanical rigidity no longer requires for its manifestation a
stumbling-block which either the hazard of circumstance or human
knavery has set in its way, but extracts by natural processes, from its
own store, an inexhaustible series of opportunities for externally
revealing its presence. Suppose, then, we imagine a mind always
thinking of what it has just done and never of what it is doing, like a
song which lags behind its accompaniment. Let us try to picture to
ourselves a certain inborn lack of elasticity of both senses and
intelligence, which brings it to pass that we continue to see what is
no longer visible, to hear what is no longer audible, to say what is no
longer to the point: in short, to adapt ourselves to a past and
therefore imaginary situation, when we ought to be shaping our conduct
in accordance with the reality which is present. This time the comic
will take up its abode in the person himself; it is the person who will
supply it with everything--matter and form, cause and opportunity. Is
it then surprising that the absent-minded individual--for this is the
character we have just been describing--has usually fired the
imagination of comic authors? When La Bruyere came across this
particular type, he realised, on analysing it, that he had got hold of
a recipe for the wholesale manufacture of comic effects. As a matter of
fact he overdid it, and gave us far too lengthy and detailed a
description of Menalque, coming back to his subject, dwelling and
expatiating on it beyond all bounds. The very facility of the subject
fascinated him. Absentmindedness, indeed, is not perhaps the actual
fountain-head of the comic, but surely it is contiguous to a certain
stream of facts and fancies which flows straight from the
fountain-head. It is situated, so to say, on one of the great natural
watersheds of laughter.
Now, the effect of absentmindedness may gather strength in its turn.
There is a general law, the first example of which we have just
encountered, and which we will formulate in the following terms: when a
certain comic effect has its origin in a certain cause, the more
natural we regard the cause to be, the more comic shall we find the
effect. Even now we laugh at absentmindedness when presented to us as a
simple fact. Still more laughable will be the absentmindedness we have
seen springing up and growing before our very eyes, with whose origin
we are acquainted and whose life-history we can reconstruct. To choose
a definite example: suppose a man has taken to reading nothing but
romances of love and chivalry. Attracted and fascinated by his heroes,
his thoughts and intentions gradually turn more and more towards them,
till one fine day we find him walking among us like a somnambulist. His
actions are distractions. But then his distractions can be traced back
to a definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of ABSENCE of
mind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the PRESENCE of
the individual in quite definite, though imaginary, surroundings.
Doubtless a fall is always a fall, but it is one thing to tumble into a
well because you were looking anywhere but in front of you, it is quite
another thing to fall into it because you were intent upon a star. It
was certainly a star at which Don Quixote was gazing. How profound is
the comic element in the over-romantic, Utopian bent of mind! And yet,
if you reintroduce the idea of absentmindedness, which acts as a
go-between, you will see this profound comic element uniting with the
most superficial type. Yes, indeed, these whimsical wild enthusiasts,
these madmen who are yet so strangely reasonable, excite us to laughter
by playing on the same chords within ourselves, by setting in motion
the same inner mechanism, as does the victim of a practical joke or the
passer-by who slips down in the street. They, too, are runners who fall
and simple souls who are being hoaxed--runners after the ideal who
stumble over realities, child-like dreamers for whom life delights to
lie in wait. But, above all, they are past-masters in absentmindedness,
with this superiority over their fellows that their absentmindedness is
systematic and organised around one central idea, and that their
mishaps are also quite coherent, thanks to the inexorable logic which
reality applies to the correction of dreams, so that they kindle in
those around them, by a series of cumulative effects, a hilarity
capable of unlimited expansion.
Now, let us go a little further. Might not certain vices have the same
relation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea has to
intellect? Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to the
will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature of the soul.
Doubtless there are vices into which the soul plunges deeply with all
its pregnant potency, which it rejuvenates and drags along with it into
a moving circle of reincarnations. Those are tragic vices. But the vice
capable of making us comic is, on the contrary, that which is brought
from without, like a ready-made frame into which we are to step. It
lends us its own rigidity instead of borrowing from us our flexibility.
We do not render it more complicated; on the contrary, it simplifies
us. Here, as we shall see later on in the concluding section of this
study, lies the essential difference between comedy and drama. A drama,
even when portraying passions or vices that bear a name, so completely
incorporates them in the person that their names are forgotten, their
general characteristics effaced, and we no longer think of them at all,
but rather of the person in whom they are assimilated; hence, the title
of a drama can seldom be anything else than a proper noun. On the other
hand, many comedies have a common noun as their title: l'Avare, le
Joueur, etc. Were you asked to think of a play capable of being called
le Jaloux, for instance, you would find that Sganarelle or George
Dandin would occur to your mind, but not Othello: le Jaloux could only
be the title of a comedy. The reason is that, however intimately vice,
when comic, is associated with persons, it none the less retains its
simple, independent existence, it remains the central character,
present though invisible, to which the characters in flesh and blood on
the stage are attached. At times it delights in dragging them down with
its own weight and making them share in its tumbles. More frequently,
however, it plays on them as on an instrument or pulls the strings as
though they were puppets. Look closely: you will find that the art of
the comic poet consists in making us so well acquainted with the
particular vice, in introducing us, the spectators, to such a degree of
intimacy with it, that in the end we get hold of some of the strings of
the marionette with which he is playing, and actually work them
ourselves; this it is that explains part of the pleasure we feel. Here,
too, it is really a kind of automatism that makes us laugh--an
automatism, as we have already remarked, closely akin to mere
absentmindedness. To realise this more fully, it need only be noted
that a comic character is generally comic in proportion to his
ignorance of himself. The comic person is unconscious. As though
wearing the ring of Gyges with reverse effect, he becomes invisible to
himself while remaining visible to all the world. A character in a
tragedy will make no change in his conduct because he will know how it
is judged by us; he may continue therein, even though fully conscious
of what he is and feeling keenly the horror he inspires in us. But a
defect that is ridiculous, as soon as it feels itself to be so,
endeavours to modify itself, or at least to appear as though it did.
Were Harpagon to see us laugh at his miserliness, I do not say that he
would get rid of it, but he would either show it less or show it
differently. Indeed, it is in this sense only that laughter "corrects
men's manners." It makes us at once endeavour to appear what we ought
to be, what some day we shall perhaps end in being.
It is unnecessary to carry this analysis any further. From the runner
who falls to the simpleton who is hoaxed, from a state of being hoaxed
to one of absentmindedness, from absentmindedness to wild enthusiasm,
from wild enthusiasm to various distortions of character and will, we
have followed the line of progress along which the comic becomes more
and more deeply imbedded in the person, yet without ceasing, in its
subtler manifestations, to recall to us some trace of what we noticed
in its grosser forms, an effect of automatism and of inelasticity. Now
we can obtain a first glimpse--a distant one, it is true, and still
hazy and confused--of the laughable side of human nature and of the
ordinary function of laughter.
What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert
attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation, together
with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt
ourselves in consequence. TENSION and ELASTICITY are two forces,
mutually complementary, which life brings into play. If these two
forces are lacking in the body to any considerable extent, we have
sickness and infirmity and accidents of every kind. If they are lacking
in the mind, we find every degree of mental deficiency, every variety
of insanity. Finally, if they are lacking in the character, we have
cases of the gravest inadaptability to social life, which are the
sources of misery and at times the causes of crime. Once these elements
of inferiority that affect the serious side of existence are
removed--and they tend to eliminate themselves in what has been called
the struggle for life--the person can live, and that in common with
other persons. But society asks for something more; it is not satisfied
with simply living, it insists on living well. What it now has to dread
is that each one of us, content with paying attention to what affects
the essentials of life, will, so far as the rest is concerned, give way
to the easy automatism of acquired habits. Another thing it must fear
is that the members of whom it is made up, instead of aiming after an
increasingly delicate adjustment of wills which will fit more and more
perfectly into one another, will confine themselves to respecting
simply the fundamental conditions of this adjustment: a cut-and-dried
agreement among the persons will not satisfy it, it insists on a