Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
PROPORTION AS THAT BODY REMINDS US OF A MERE MACHINE. There is no need
to follow this law through the details of its immediate applications,
which are innumerable. To verify it directly, it would be sufficient to
study closely the work of comic artists, eliminating entirely the
element of caricature, and omitting that portion of the comic which is
not inherent in the drawing itself. For, obviously, the comic element
in a drawing is often a borrowed one, for which the text supplies all
the stock-in-trade. I mean that the artist may be his own understudy in
the shape of a satirist, or even a playwright, and that then we laugh
far less at the drawings themselves than at the satire or comic
incident they represent. But if we devote our whole attention to the
drawing with the firm resolve to think of nothing else, we shall
probably find that it is generally comic in proportion to the
clearness, as well as the subtleness, with which it enables us to see a
man as a jointed puppet. The suggestion must be a clear one, for inside
the person we must distinctly perceive, as though through a glass, a
set-up mechanism. But the suggestion must also be a subtle one, for the
general appearance of the person, whose every limb has been made rigid
as a machine, must continue to give us the impression of a living
being. The more exactly these two images, that of a person and that of
a machine, fit into each other, the more striking is the comic effect,
and the more consummate the art of the draughtsman. The originality of
a comic artist is thus expressed in the special kind of life he imparts
to a mere puppet.
We will, however, leave on one side the immediate application of the
principle, and at this point insist only on the more remote
consequences. The illusion of a machine working in the inside of the
person is a thing that only crops up amid a host of amusing effects;
but for the most part it is a fleeting glimpse, that is immediately
lost in the laughter it provokes. To render it permanent, analysis and
reflection must be called into play.
In a public speaker, for instance, we find that gesture vies with
speech. Jealous of the latter, gesture closely dogs the speaker's
thought, demanding also to act as interpreter. Well and good; but then
it must pledge itself to follow thought through all the phases of its
development. An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms and ripens
from the beginning to the end of a speech. It never halts, never
repeats itself. It must be changing every moment, for to cease to
change would be to cease to live. Then let gesture display a like
animation! Let it accept the fundamental law of life, which is the
complete negation of repetition! But I find that a certain movement of
head or arm, a movement always the same, seems to return at regular
intervals. If I notice it and it succeeds in diverting my attention, if
I wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it, then
involuntarily I laugh. Why? Because I now have before me a machine that
works automatically. This is no longer life, it is automatism
established in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic.
This is also the reason why gestures, at which we never dreamt of
laughing, become laughable when imitated by another individual. The
most elaborate explanations have been offered for this extremely simple
fact. A little reflection, however, will show that our mental state is
ever changing, and that if our gestures faithfully followed these inner
movements, if they were as fully alive as we, they would never repeat
themselves, and so would keep imitation at bay. We begin, then, to
become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves. I mean our gestures
can only be imitated in their mechanical uniformity, and therefore
exactly in what is alien to our living personality. To imitate any one
is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into
his person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no
wonder that imitation gives rise to laughter.
Still, if the imitation of gestures is intrinsically laughable, it will
become even more so when it busies itself in deflecting them, though
without altering their form, towards some mechanical occupation, such
as sawing wood, striking on an anvil, or tugging away at an imaginary
bell-rope. Not that vulgarity is the essence of the comic,--although
certainly it is to some extent an ingredient,--but rather that the
incriminated gesture seems more frankly mechanical when it can be
connected with a simple operation, as though it were intentionally
mechanical. To suggest this mechanical interpretation ought to be one
of the favourite devices of parody. We have reached this result through
deduction, but I imagine clowns have long had an intuition of the fact.
This seems to me the solution of the little riddle propounded by Pascal
in one passage of his Thoughts: "Two faces that are alike, although
neither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh when
together, on account of their likeness." It might just as well be said:
"The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by
itself, excite laughter by their repetition." The truth is that a
really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever there is
repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at
work behind the living. Analyse the impression you get from two faces
that are too much alike, and you will find that you are thinking of two
copies cast in the same mould, or two impressions of the same seal, or
two reproductions of the same negative,--in a word, of some
manufacturing process or other. This deflection of life towards the
mechanical is here the real cause of laughter.
And laughter will be more pronounced still, if we find on the stage not
merely two characters, as in the example from Pascal, but several, nay,
as great a number as possible, the image of one another, who come and
go, dance and gesticulate together, simultaneously striking the same
attitudes and tossing their arms about in the same manner. This time,
we distinctly think of marionettes. Invisible threads seem to us to be
joining arms to arms, legs to legs, each muscle in one face to its
fellow-muscle in the other: by reason of the absolute uniformity which
prevails, the very litheness of the bodies seems to stiffen as we gaze,
and the actors themselves seem transformed into automata. Such, at
least, appears to be the artifice underlying this somewhat obvious form
of amusement. I daresay the performers have never read Pascal, but what
they do is merely to realise to the full the suggestions contained in
Pascal's words. If, as is undoubtedly the case, laughter is caused in
the second instance by the hallucination of a mechanical effect, it
must already have been so, though in more subtle fashion, in the first.
Continuing along this path, we dimly perceive the increasingly
important and far-reaching consequences of the law we have just stated.
We faintly catch still more fugitive glimpses of mechanical effects,
glimpses suggested by man's complex actions, no longer merely by his
gestures. We instinctively feel that the usual devices of comedy, the
periodical repetition of a word or a scene, the systematic inversion of
the parts, the geometrical development of a farcical misunderstanding,
and many other stage contrivances, must derive their comic force from
the same source,--the art of the playwright probably consisting in
setting before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human events,
while carefully preserving an outward aspect of probability and thereby
retaining something of the suppleness of life. But we must not
forestall results which will be duly disclosed in the course of our
analysis.
V
Before going further, let us halt a moment and glance around. As we
hinted at the outset of this study, it would be idle to attempt to
derive every comic effect from one simple formula. The formula exists
well enough in a certain sense, but its development does not follow a
straightforward course. What I mean is that the process of deduction
ought from time to time to stop and study certain culminating effects,
and that these effects each appear as models round which new effects
resembling them take their places in a circle. These latter are not
deductions from the formula, but are comic through their relationship
with those that are. To quote Pascal again, I see no objection, at this
stage, to defining the process by the curve which that geometrician
studied under the name of roulette or cycloid,--the curve traced by a
point in the circumference of a wheel when the carriage is advancing in
a straight line: this point turns like the wheel, though it advances
like the carriage. Or else we might think of an immense avenue such as
are to be seen in the forest of Fontainebleau, with crosses at
intervals to indicate the cross-ways: at each of these we shall walk
round the cross, explore for a while the paths that open out before us,
and then return to our original course. Now, we have just reached one
of these mental crossways. Something mechanical encrusted on the
living, will represent a cross at which we must halt, a central image
from which the imagination branches off in different directions. What
are these directions? There appear to be three main ones. We will
follow them one after the other, and then continue our onward course.
1. In the first place, this view of the mechanical and the living
dovetailed into each other makes us incline towards the vaguer image of
SOME RIGIDITY OR OTHER applied to the mobility of life, in an awkward
attempt to follow its lines and counterfeit its suppleness. Here we
perceive how easy it is for a garment to become ridiculous. It might
almost be said that every fashion is laughable in some respect. Only,
when we are dealing with the fashion of the day, we are so accustomed
to it that the garment seems, in our mind, to form one with the
individual wearing it. We do not separate them in imagination. The idea
no longer occurs to us to contrast the inert rigidity of the covering
with the living suppleness of the object covered: consequently, the
comic here remains in a latent condition. It will only succeed in
emerging when the natural incompatibility is so deep-seated between the
covering and the covered that even an immemorial association fails to
cement this union: a case in point is our head and top hat. Suppose,
however, some eccentric individual dresses himself in the fashion of
former times: our attention is immediately drawn to the clothes
themselves, we absolutely distinguish them from the individual, we say
that the latter IS DISGUISING HIMSELF,--as though every article of
clothing were not a disguise!--and the laughable aspect of fashion
comes out of the shadow into the light.
Here we are beginning to catch a faint glimpse of the highly intricate
difficulties raised by this problem of the comic. One of the reasons
that must have given rise to many erroneous or unsatisfactory theories
of laughter is that many things are comic de jure without being comic
de facto, the continuity of custom having deadened within them the
comic quality. A sudden dissolution of continuity is needed, a break
with fashion, for this quality to revive. Hence the impression that
this dissolution of continuity is the parent of the comic, whereas all
it does is to bring it to our notice. Hence, again, the explanation of
laughter by surprise, contrast, etc., definitions which would equally
apply to a host of cases in which we have no inclination whatever to
laugh. The truth of the matter is far from being so simple. But to
return to our idea of disguise, which, as we have just shown, has been
entrusted with the special mandate of arousing laughter. It will not be