Laughter : An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing.  They would not laugh at him, I imagine, could they suppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on the ground.  They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary.

Consequently, it is not his sudden change of attitude that raises a laugh, but rather the involuntary element in this change,—­his clumsiness, in fact.  Perhaps there was a stone on the road.  He should have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle.  Instead of that, through lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy, as A result, in fact, of rigidity or of momentum, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else.  That is the reason of the man’s fall, and also of the people’s laughter.

Now, take the case of a person who attends to the petty occupations of his everyday life with mathematical precision.  The objects around him, 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 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.