Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
of the persons. Let us now turn to comedy. Many a droll scene, many a
comedy even, may be referred to this simple type. Read the speech of
Chicanneau in the Plaideurs: here we find lawsuits within lawsuits, and
the mechanism works faster and faster--Racine produces in us this
feeling of increasing acceleration by crowding his law terms ever
closer together--until the lawsuit over a truss of hay costs the
plaintiff the best part of his fortune. And again the same arrangement
occurs in certain scenes of Don Quixote; for instance, in the inn
scene, where, by an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, the
mule-driver strikes Sancho, who belabours Maritornes, upon whom the
innkeeper falls, etc. Finally, let us pass to the light comedy of
to-day. Need we call to mind all the forms in which this same
combination appears? There is one that is employed rather frequently.
For instance, a certain thing, say a letter, happens to be of supreme
importance to a certain person and must be recovered at all costs. This
thing, which always vanishes just when you think you have caught it,
pervades the entire play, "rolling up" increasingly serious and
unexpected incidents as it proceeds. All this is far more like a
child's game than appears at first blush. Once more the effect produced
is that of the snowball.
It is the characteristic of a mechanical combination to be generally
REVERSIBLE. A child is delighted when he sees the ball in a game of
ninepins knocking down everything in its way and spreading havoc in all
directions; he laughs louder than ever when the ball returns to its
starting-point after twists and turns and waverings of every kind. In
other words, the mechanism just described is laughable even when
rectilinear, it is much more so on becoming circular and when every
effort the player makes, by a fatal interaction of cause and effect,
merely results in bringing it back to the same spot. Now, a
considerable number of light comedies revolve round this idea. An
Italian straw hat has been eaten up by a horse. [Footnote: Un Chapeau
de paille d'Italie (Labiche).] There is only one other hat like it in
the whole of Paris; it MUST be secured regardless of cost. This hat,
which always slips away at the moment its capture seems inevitable,
keeps the principal character on the run, and through him all the
others who hang, so to say, on to his coat tails, like a magnet which,
by a successive series of attractions, draws along in its train the
grains of iron filings that hang on to each other. And when at last,
after all sorts of difficulties, the goal seems in sight, it is found
that the hat so ardently sought is precisely the one that has been
eaten. The same voyage of discovery is depicted in another equally
well-known comedy of Labiche. [Footnote: La Cagnotte.] The curtain
rises on an old bachelor and an old maid, acquaintances of long
standing, at the moment of enjoying their daily rubber. Each of them,
unknown to the other, has applied to the same matrimonial agency.
Through innumerable difficulties, one mishap following on the heels of
another, they hurry along, side by side, right through the play, to the
interview which brings them back, purely and simply, into each other's
presence. We have the same circular effect, the same return to the
starting-point, in a more recent play. [Footnote: Les Surprises du
divorce.] A henpecked husband imagines he has escaped by divorce from
the clutches of his wife and his mother-in-law. He marries again, when,
lo and behold, the double combination of marriage and divorce brings
back to him his former wife in the aggravated form of a second
mother-in-law!
When we think how intense and how common is this type of the comic, we
understand why it has fascinated the imagination of certain
philosophers. To cover a good deal of ground only to come back
unwittingly to the starting-point, is to make a great effort for a
result that is nil. So we might be tempted to define the comic in this
latter fashion. And such, indeed, seems to be the idea of Herbert
Spencer: according to him, laughter is the indication of an effort
which suddenly encounters a void. Kant had already said something of
the kind: "Laughter is the result of an expectation, which, of a
sudden, ends in nothing." No doubt these definitions would apply to the
last few examples given, although, even then, the formula needs the
addition of sundry limitations, for we often make an ineffectual effort
which is in no way provocative of laughter. While, however, the last
few examples are illustrations of a great cause resulting in a small
effect, we quoted others, immediately before, which might be defined
inversely as a great effect springing from a small cause. The truth is,
this second definition has scarcely more validity than the first. Lack
of proportion between cause and effect, whether appearing in one or in
the other, is never the direct source of laughter. What we do laugh at
is something that this lack of proportion may in certain cases
disclose, namely, a particular mechanical arrangement which it reveals
to us, as through a glass, at the back of the series of effects and
causes. Disregard this arrangement, and you let go the only clue
capable of guiding you through the labyrinth of the comic. Any
hypothesis you otherwise would select, while possibly applicable to a
few carefully chosen cases, is liable at any moment to be met and
overthrown by the first unsuitable instance that comes along.
But why is it we laugh at this mechanical arrangement? It is doubtless
strange that the history of a person or of a group should sometimes
appear like a game worked by strings, or gearings, or springs; but from
what source does the special character of this strangeness arise? What
is it that makes it laughable? To this question, which we have already
propounded in various forms, our answer must always be the same. The
rigid mechanism which we occasionally detect, as a foreign body, in the
living continuity of human affairs is of peculiar interest to us as
being a kind of ABSENTMINDEDNESS on the part of life. Were events
unceasingly mindful of their own course, there would be no
coincidences, no conjunctures and no circular series; everything would
evolve and progress continuously. And were all men always attentive to
life, were we constantly keeping in touch with others as well as with
ourselves, nothing within us would ever appear as due to the working of
strings or springs. The comic is that side of a person which reveals
his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its
peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of
automatism, of movement without life. Consequently it expresses an
individual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate
corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles
out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and in
events.
But this in turn tempts us to make further investigations. So far, we
have spent our time in rediscovering, in the diversions of the grownup
man, those mechanical combinations which amused him as a child. Our
methods, in fact, have been entirely empirical. Let us now attempt to
frame a full and methodical theory, by seeking, as it were, at the
fountainhead, the changeless and simple archetypes of the manifold and
transient practices of the comic stage. Comedy, we said, combines
events so as to introduce mechanism into the outer forms of life. Let
us now ascertain in what essential characteristics life, when viewed
from without, seems to contrast with mere mechanism. We shall only
have, then, to turn to the opposite characteristics, in order to
discover the abstract formula, this time a general and complete one,
for every real and possible method of comedy.
Life presents itself to us as evolution in time and complexity in
space. Regarded in time, it is the continuous evolution of a being ever
growing older; it never goes backwards and never repeats anything.
Considered in space, it exhibits certain coexisting elements so closely
interdependent, so exclusively made for one another, that not one of
them could, at the same time, belong to two different organisms: each
living being is a closed system of phenomena, incapable of interfering
with other systems. A continual change of aspect, the irreversibility
of the order of phenomena, the perfect individuality of a perfectly
self-contained series: such, then, are the outward
characteristics--whether real or apparent is of little moment--which
distinguish the living from the merely mechanical. Let us take the
counterpart of each of these: we shall obtain three processes which
might be called REPETITION, INVERSION, and RECIPROCAL INTERFERENCE OF
SERIES. Now, it is easy to see that these are also the methods of light
comedy, and that no others are possible.
As a matter of fact, we could discover them, as ingredients of varying
importance, in the composition of all the scenes we have just been
considering, and, a fortiori, in the children's games, the mechanism of
which they reproduce. The requisite analysis would, however, delay us
too long, and it is more profitable to study them in their purity by
taking fresh examples. Nothing could be easier, for it is in their pure
state that they are found both in classic comedy and in contemporary
plays.
1. REPETITION.-Our present problem no longer deals, like the preceding
one, with a word or a sentence repeated by an individual, but rather
with a situation, that is, a combination of circumstances, which recurs
several times in its original form and thus contrasts with the changing
stream of life. Everyday experience supplies us with this type of the
comic, though only in a rudimentary state. Thus, you meet a friend in
the street whom you have not seen for an age; there is nothing comic in
the situation. If, however, you meet, him again the same day, and then
a third and a fourth time, you may laugh at the "coincidence." Now,
picture to yourself a series of imaginary events which affords a
tolerably fair illusion of life, and within this ever-moving series
imagine one and the same scene reproduced either by the same characters
or by different ones: again you will have a coincidence, though a far
more extraordinary one.
Such are the repetitions produced on the stage. They are the more
laughable in proportion as the scene repeated is more complex and more
naturally introduced--two conditions which seem mutually exclusive, and
which the play-writer must be clever enough to reconcile.
Contemporary light comedy employs this method in every shape and form.
One of the best-known examples consists in bringing a group of
characters, act after act, into the most varied surroundings, so as to
reproduce, under ever fresh circumstances, one and the same series of
incidents or accidents more or less symmetrically identical.
In several of Moliere's plays we find one and the same arrangement of
events repeated right through the comedy from beginning to end. Thus,
the Ecole des femmes does nothing more than reproduce and repeat a
single incident in three tempi: first tempo, Horace tells Arnolphe of
the plan he has devised to deceive Agnes's guardian, who turns out to
be Arnolphe himself; second tempo, Arnolphe thinks he has checkmated
the move; third tempo, Agnes contrives that Horace gets all the benefit
of Arnolphe's precautionary measures. There is the same symmetrical
repetition in the Ecole des marts, in L'Etourdi, and above all in
George Dandin, where the same effect in three tempi is again met with:
first tempo, George Dandin discovers that his wife is unfaithful;
second tempo, he summons his father--and mother-in-law to his
assistance; third tempo, it is George Dandin himself, after all, who