Laughter : An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

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.