Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
out of place to investigate the uses it makes of this power.
Why do we laugh at a head of hair which has changed from dark to blond?
What is there comic about a rubicund nose? And why does one laugh at a
negro? The question would appear to be an embarrassing one, for it has
been asked by successive psychologists such as Hecker, Kraepelin and
Lipps, and all have given different replies. And yet I rather fancy the
correct answer was suggested to me one day in the street by an ordinary
cabby, who applied the expression "unwashed" to the negro fare he was
driving. Unwashed! Does not this mean that a black face, in our
imagination, is one daubed over with ink or soot? If so, then a red
nose can only be one which has received a coating of vermilion. And so
we see that the notion of disguise has passed on something of its comic
quality to instances in which there is actually no disguise, though
there might be.
In the former set of examples, although his usual dress was distinct
from the individual, it appeared in our mind to form one with him,
because we had become accustomed to the sight. In the latter, although
the black or red colour is indeed inherent in the skin, we look upon it
as artificially laid on, because it surprises us.
But here we meet with a fresh crop of difficulties in the theory of the
comic. Such a proposition as the following: "My usual dress forms part
of my body" is absurd in the eyes of reason. Yet imagination looks upon
it as true. "A red nose is a painted nose," "A negro is a white man in
disguise," are also absurd to the reason which rationalises; but they
are gospel truths to pure imagination. So there is a logic of the
imagination which is not the logic of reason, one which at times is
even opposed to the latter,--with which, however, philosophy must
reckon, not only in the study of the comic, but in every other
investigation of the same kind. It is something like the logic of
dreams, though of dreams that have not been left to the whim of
individual fancy, being the dreams dreamt by the whole of society. In
order to reconstruct this hidden logic, a special kind of effort is
needed, by which the outer crust of carefully stratified judgments and
firmly established ideas will be lifted, and we shall behold in the
depths of our mind, like a sheet of subterranean water, the flow of an
unbroken stream of images which pass from one into another. This
interpenetration of images does not come about by chance. It obeys
laws, or rather habits, which hold the same relation to imagination
that logic does to thought.
Let us then follow this logic of the imagination in the special case in
hand. A man in disguise is comic. A man we regard as disguised is also
comic. So, by analogy, any disguise is seen to become comic, not only
that of a man, but that of society also, and even the disguise of
nature.
Let us start with nature. You laugh at a dog that is half-clipped, at a
bed of artificially coloured flowers, at a wood in which the trees are
plastered over with election addresses, etc. Look for the reason, and
you will see that you are once more thinking of a masquerade. Here,
however, the comic element is very faint; it is too far from its
source. If you wish to strengthen it, you must go back to the source
itself and contrast the derived image, that of a masquerade, with the
original one, which, be it remembered, was that of a mechanical
tampering with life. In "a nature that is mechanically tampered with"
we possess a thoroughly comic theme, on which fancy will be able to
play ever so many variations with the certainty of successfully
provoking the heartiest hilarity. You may call to mind that amusing
passage in Tartarin Sur Les Alpes, in which Bompard makes Tartarin--and
therefore also the reader to some slight extent--accept the idea of a
Switzerland choke-full of machinery like the basement of the opera, and
run by a company which maintains a series of waterfalls, glaciers and
artificial crevasses. The same theme reappears, though transposed in
quite another key, in the Novel Notes of the English humorist, Jerome
K. Jerome. An elderly Lady Bountiful, who does not want her deeds of
charity to take up too much of her time, provides homes within easy
hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been
specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest
folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of
their failing, etc. There are comic phrases in which this theme is
audible, like a distant echo, coupled with an ingenuousness, whether
sincere or affected, which acts as accompaniment. Take, as an instance,
the remark made by a lady whom Cassini, the astronomer, had invited to
see an eclipse of the moon. Arriving too late, she said, "M. de
Cassini, I know, will have the goodness to begin it all over again, to
please me." Or, take again the exclamation of one of Gondiinet's
characters on arriving in a town and learning that there is an extinct
volcano in the neighbourhood, "They had a volcano, and they have let it
go out!"
Let us go on to society. As we are both in and of it, we cannot help
treating it as a living being. Any image, then, suggestive of the
notion of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade, so to
speak, will be laughable. Now, such a notion is formed when we perceive
anything inert or stereotyped, or simply ready-made, on the surface of
living society. There we have rigidity over again, clashing with the
inner suppleness of life. The ceremonial side of social life must,
therefore, always include a latent comic element, which is only waiting
for an opportunity to burst into full view. It might be said that
ceremonies are to the social body what clothing is to the individual
body: they owe their seriousness to the fact that they are identified,
in our minds, with the serious object with which custom associates
them, and when we isolate them in imagination, they forthwith lose
their seriousness. For any ceremony, then, to become comic, it is
enough that our attention be fixed on the ceremonial element in it, and
that we neglect its matter, as philosophers say, and think only of its
form. Every one knows how easily the comic spirit exercises its
ingenuity on social actions of a stereotyped nature, from an ordinary
prize-distribution to the solemn sitting of a court of justice. Any
form or formula is a ready-made frame into which the comic element may
be fitted.
Here, again, the comic will be emphasised by bringing it nearer to its
source. From the idea of travesty, a derived one, we must go back to
the original idea, that of a mechanism superposed upon life. Already,
the stiff and starched formality of any ceremonial suggests to us an
image of this kind. For, as soon as we forget the serious object of a
solemnity or a ceremony, those taking part in it give us the impression
of puppets in motion. Their mobility seems to adopt as a model the
immobility of a formula. It becomes automatism. But complete automatism
is only reached in the official, for instance, who performs his duty
like a mere machine, or again in the unconsciousness that marks an
administrative regulation working with inexorable fatality, and setting
itself up for a law of nature. Quite by chance, when reading the
newspaper, I came across a specimen of the comic of this type. Twenty
years ago, a large steamer was wrecked off the coast at Dieppe. With
considerable difficulty some of the passengers were rescued in a boat.
A few custom-house officers, who had courageously rushed to their
assistance, began by asking them "if they had anything to declare." We
find something similar, though the idea is a more subtle one, in the
remark of an M.P. when questioning the Home Secretary on the morrow of
a terrible murder which took place in a railway carriage: "The
assassin, after despatching his victim, must have got out the wrong
side of the train, thereby infringing the Company's rules."
A mechanical element introduced into nature and an automatic regulation
of society, such, then, are the two types of laughable effects at which
we have arrived. It remains for us, in conclusion, to combine them and
see what the result will be.
The result of the combination will evidently be a human regulation of
affairs usurping the place of the laws of nature. We may call to mind
the answer Sganarelle gave Geronte when the latter remarked that the
heart was on the left side and the liver on the right: "Yes, it was so
formerly, but we have altered all that; now, we practise medicine in
quite a new way." We may also recall the consultation between M. de
Pourceaugnac's two doctors: "The arguments you have used are so erudite
and elegant that it is impossible for the patient not to be
hypochondriacally melancholic; or, even if he were not, he must surely
become so because of the elegance of the things you have said and the
accuracy of your reasoning." We might multiply examples, for all we
need do would be to call up Moliere's doctors, one after the other.
However far, moreover, comic fancy may seem to go, reality at times
undertakes to improve upon it. It was suggested to a contemporary
philosopher, an out-and-out arguer, that his arguments, though
irreproachable in their deductions, had experience against them. He put
an end to the discussion by merely remarking, "Experience is in the
wrong." The truth is, this idea of regulating life as a matter of
business routine is more widespread than might be imagined; it is
natural in its way, although we have just obtained it by an artificial
process of reconstruction. One might say that it gives us the very
quintessence of pedantry, which, at bottom, is nothing else than art
pretending to outdo nature.
To sum up, then, we have one and the same effect, which assumes ever
subtler forms as it passes from the idea of an artificial MECHANISATION
of the human body, if such an expression is permissible, to that of any
substitution whatsoever of the artificial for the natural. A less and
less rigorous logic, that more and more resembles the logic of
dreamland, transfers the same relationship into higher and higher
spheres, between increasingly immaterial terms, till in the end we find
a mere administrative enactment occupying the same relation to a
natural or moral law that a ready-made garment, for instance, does to
the living body. We have now gone right to the end of the first of the
three directions we had to follow. Let us turn to the second and see
where it will lead us.
2. Our starting-point is again "something mechanical encrusted upon the
living." Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from the
fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine. Accordingly, it
seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of
suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. But
this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body.
It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher
principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. When
we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is
because we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and,
in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of its
vitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principle
of intellectual and moral life, Let us suppose, however, that our
attention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far from
sharing in the lightness and subtlety of the principle with which it is
animated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersome
vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to earth a soul
eager to rise aloft. Then the body will become to the soul what, as we