Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
constant striving after reciprocal adaptation. Society will therefore
be suspicious of all INELASTICITY of character, of mind and even of
body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well
as of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve
from the common centre round which society gravitates: in short,
because it is the sign of an eccentricity. And yet, society cannot
intervene at this stage by material repression, since it is not
affected in a material fashion. It is confronted with something that
makes it uneasy, but only as a symptom--scarcely a threat, at the very
most a gesture. A gesture, therefore, will be its reply. Laughter must
be something of this kind, a sort of SOCIAL GESTURE. By the fear which
it inspires, it restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in
mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might
retire into their shell and go to sleep, and, in short, softens down
whatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical
inelasticity. Laughter, then, does not belong to the province of
esthetics alone, since unconsciously (and even immorally in many
particular instances) it pursues a utilitarian aim of general
improvement. And yet there is something esthetic about it, since the
comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed from
the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of
art. In a word, if a circle be drawn round those actions and
dispositions--implied in individual or social life--to which their
natural consequences bring their own penalties, there remains outside
this sphere of emotion and struggle--and within a neutral zone in which
man simply exposes himself to man's curiosity--a certain rigidity of
body, mind and character, that society would still like to get rid of
in order to obtain from its members the greatest possible degree of
elasticity and sociability. This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is
its corrective.
Still, we must not accept this formula as a definition of the comic. It
is suitable only for cases that are elementary, theoretical and
perfect, in which the comic is free from all adulteration. Nor do we
offer it, either, as an explanation. We prefer to make it, if you will,
the leitmotiv which is to accompany all our explanations. We must ever
keep it in mind, though without dwelling on it too much, somewhat as a
skilful fencer must think of the discontinuous movements of the lesson
whilst his body is given up to the continuity of the fencing-match. We
will now endeavour to reconstruct the sequence of comic forms, taking
up again the thread that leads from the horseplay of a clown up to the
most refined effects of comedy, following this thread in its often
unforeseen windings, halting at intervals to look around, and finally
getting back, if possible, to the point at which the thread is dangling
and where we shall perhaps find--since the comic oscillates between
life and art--the general relation that art bears to life.
III
Let us begin at the simplest point. What is a comic physiognomy? Where
does a ridiculous expression of the face come from? And what is, in
this case, the distinction between the comic and the ugly? Thus stated,
the question could scarcely be answered in any other than an arbitrary
fashion. Simple though it may appear, it is, even now, too subtle to
allow of a direct attack. We should have to begin with a definition of
ugliness, and then discover what addition the comic makes to it; now,
ugliness is not much easier to analyse than is beauty. However, we will
employ an artifice which will often stand us in good stead. We will
exaggerate the problem, so to speak, by magnifying the effect to the
point of making the cause visible. Suppose, then, we intensify ugliness
to the point of deformity, and study the transition from the deformed
to the ridiculous.
Now, certain deformities undoubtedly possess over others the sorry
privilege of causing some persons to laugh; some hunchbacks, for
instance, will excite laughter. Without at this point entering into
useless details, we will simply ask the reader to think of a number of
deformities, and then to divide them into two groups: on the one hand,
those which nature has directed towards the ridiculous; and on the
other, those which absolutely diverge from it. No doubt he will hit
upon the following law: A deformity that may become comic is a
deformity that a normally built person, could successfully imitate.
Is it not, then, the case that the hunchback suggests the appearance of
a person who holds himself badly? His back seems to have contracted an
ugly stoop. By a kind of physical obstinacy, by rigidity, in a word, it
persists in the habit it has contracted. Try to see with your eyes
alone. Avoid reflection, and above all, do not reason. Abandon all your
prepossessions; seek to recapture a fresh, direct and primitive
impression. The vision you will reacquire will be one of this kind. You
will have before you a man bent on cultivating a certain rigid
attitude--whose body, if one may use the expression, is one vast grin.
Now, let us go back to the point we wished to clear up. By toning down
a deformity that is laughable, we ought to obtain an ugliness that is
comic. A laughable expression of the face, then, is one that will make
us think of something rigid and, so to speak, coagulated, in the wonted
mobility of the face. What we shall see will be an ingrained twitching
or a fixed grimace. It may be objected that every habitual expression
of the face, even when graceful and beautiful, gives us this same
impression of something stereotyped? Here an important distinction must
be drawn. When we speak of expressive beauty or even expressive
ugliness, when we say that a face possesses expression, we mean
expression that may be stable, but which we conjecture to be mobile. It
maintains, in the midst of its fixity, a certain indecision in which
are obscurely portrayed all possible shades of the state of mind it
expresses, just as the sunny promise of a warm day manifests itself in
the haze of a spring morning. But a comic expression of the face is one
that promises nothing more than it gives. It is a unique and permanent
grimace. One would say that the person's whole moral life has
crystallised into this particular cast of features. This is the reason
why a face is all the more comic, the more nearly it suggests to us the
idea of some simple mechanical action in which its personality would
for ever be absorbed. Some faces seem to be always engaged in weeping,
others in laughing or whistling, others, again, in eternally blowing an
imaginary trumpet, and these are the most comic faces of all. Here
again is exemplified the law according to which the more natural the
explanation of the cause, the more comic is the effect. Automatism,
inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and maintained, are
clearly the causes why a face makes us laugh. But this effect gains in
intensity when we are able to connect these characteristics with some
deep-seated cause, a certain fundamental absentmindedness, as though
the soul had allowed itself to be fascinated and hypnotised by the
materiality of a simple action.
We shall now understand the comic element in caricature. However
regular we may imagine a face to be, however harmonious its lines and
supple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether perfect:
there will always be discoverable the signs of some impending bias, the
vague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short some favourite
distortion towards which nature seems to be particularly inclined. The
art of the caricaturist consists in detecting this, at times,
imperceptible tendency, and in rendering it visible to all eyes by
magnifying it. He makes his models grimace, as they would do themselves
if they went to the end of their tether. Beneath the skin-deep harmony
of form, he divines the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter. He
realises disproportions and deformations which must have existed in
nature as mere inclinations, but which have not succeeded in coming to
a head, being held in check by a higher force. His art, which has a
touch of the diabolical, raises up the demon who had been overthrown by
the angel. Certainly, it is an art that exaggerates, and yet the
definition would be very far from complete were exaggeration alone
alleged to be its aim and object, for there exist caricatures that are
more lifelike than portraits, caricatures in which the exaggeration is
scarcely noticeable, whilst, inversely, it is quite possible to
exaggerate to excess without obtaining a real caricature. For
exaggeration to be comic, it must not appear as an aim, but rather as a
means that the artist is using in order to make manifest to our eyes
the distortions which he sees in embryo. It is this process of
distortion that is of moment and interest. And that is precisely why we
shall look for it even in those elements of the face that are incapable
of movement, in the curve of a nose or the shape of an ear. For, in our
eyes, form is always the outline of a movement. The caricaturist who
alters the size of a nose, but respects its ground plan, lengthening
it, for instance, in the very direction in which it was being
lengthened by nature, is really making the nose indulge in a grin.
Henceforth we shall always look upon the original as having determined
to lengthen itself and start grinning. In this sense, one might say
that Nature herself often meets with the successes of a caricaturist.
In the movement through which she has slit that mouth, curtailed that
chin and bulged out that cheek, she would appear to have succeeded in
completing the intended grimace, thus outwitting the restraining
supervision of a more reasonable force. In that case, the face we laugh
at is, so to speak, its own caricature.
To sum up, whatever be the doctrine to which our reason assents, our
imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human
form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which
is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of
gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. This soul
imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it animates: the
immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is called
gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It draws to
itself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle, would fain
convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mere
automatism. It would fain immobilise the intelligently varied movements
of the body in stupidly contracted grooves, stereotype in permanent
grimaces the fleeting expressions of the face, in short imprint on the
whole person such an attitude as to make it appear immersed and
absorbed in the materiality of some mechanical occupation instead of
ceaselessly renewing its vitality by keeping in touch with a living
ideal. Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of the
soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it
achieves, at the expense of the body, an effect that is comic. If,
then, at this point we wished to define the comic by comparing it with
its contrary, we should have to contrast it with gracefulness even more
than with beauty. It partakes rather of the unsprightly than of the
unsightly, of RIGIDNESS rather than of UGLINESS.
IV
We will now pass from the comic element in FORMS to that in GESTURES
and MOVEMENTS. Let us at once state the law which seems to govern all
the phenomena of this kind. It may indeed be deduced without any
difficulty from the considerations stated above. THE ATTITUDES,
GESTURES AND MOVEMENTS OF THE HUMAN BODY ARE LAUGHABLE IN EXACT