Laughter : An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

There may be something artificial in making a special category for the comic in words, since most of the varieties of the comic that we have examined so far were produced through the medium of language.  We must make a distinction, however, between the comic expressed and the comic created by language.  The former could, if necessary, be translated from one language into another, though at the cost of losing the greater portion of its significance when introduced into a fresh society different in manners, in literature, and above all in association of ideas.  But it is generally impossible to translate the latter.  It owes its entire being to the structure of the sentence or to the choice of the words.  It does not set forth, by means of language, special cases of absentmindedness in man or in events.  It lays stress on lapses of attention in language itself.  In this case, it is language itself that becomes comic.

Comic sayings, however, are not a matter of spontaneous generation; if we laugh at them, we are equally entitled to laugh at their author.  This latter condition, however, is not indispensable, since the saying or expression has a comic virtue of its own.  This is proved by the fact that we find it very difficult, in the majority of these cases, to say whom we are laughing at, although at times we have a dim, vague feeling that there is some one in the background.

Moreover, the person implicated is not always the speaker.  Here it seems as though we should draw an important distinction between the witty (SPIRITUEL) and the comic.  A word is said to be comic when it makes us laugh at the person who utters it, and witty when it makes us laugh either at a third party or at ourselves.  But in most cases we can hardly make up our minds whether the word is comic or witty.  All that we can say is that it is laughable.

Before proceeding, it might be well to examine more closely what is meant by ESPRIT.  A witty saying makes us at least smile; consequently, no investigation into laughter would be complete did it not get to the bottom of the nature of wit and throw light on the underlying idea.  It is to be feared, however, that this extremely subtle essence is one that evaporates when exposed to the light.

Let us first make a distinction between the two meanings of the word wit ESPRIT, the broader one and the more restricted.  In the broader meaning of the word, it would seem that what is called wit is a certain dramatic way of thinking.  Instead of treating his ideas as mere symbols, the wit sees them, he hears them and, above all, makes them converse with one another like persons.  He puts them on the stage, and himself, to some extent, into the bargain.  A witty nation is, of necessity, a nation enamoured of the theatre.  In every wit there is something of a poet—­just as in every good reader there is the making of an actor.  This comparison is made purposely, because a proportion might easily be established between the four terms.  In order to read well we need only the intellectual side of the actor’s art; but in order to act well one must be an actor in all one’s soul and body.  In just the same way, poetic creation calls for some degree of self-forgetfulness, whilst the wit does not usually err in this respect.  We always get a glimpse of the latter behind what he says and does.  He is not wholly engrossed in the business, because he only brings his intelligence into play.  So any poet may reveal himself as a wit when he pleases.  To do this there will be no need for him to acquire anything; it seems rather as though he would have to give up something.  He would simply have to let his ideas hold converse with one another “for nothing, for the mere joy of the thing!” [Footnote:  “Pour rien, pour le plaisir” is a quotation from Victor Hugo’s Marion Delorme] He would only have to unfasten the double bond which keeps his ideas in touch with his feelings and his soul in touch with life.  In short, he would turn into a wit by simply resolving to be no longer a poet in feeling, but only in intelligence.

But if wit consists, for the most part, in seeing things SUB SPECIE THEATRI, it is evidently capable of being specially directed to one variety of dramatic art, namely, comedy.  Here we have a more restricted meaning of the term, and, moreover, the only one that interests us from the point of view of the theory of laughter.  What is here called wit is a gift for dashing off comic scenes in a few strokes—­dashing them off, however, so subtly, delicately and rapidly, that all is over as soon as we begin to notice them.

Who are the actors in these scenes?  With whom has the wit to deal?  First of all, with his interlocutors themselves, when his witticism is a direct retort to one of them.  Often with an absent person whom he supposes to have spoken and to whom he is replying.  Still oftener, with the whole world,—­in the ordinary meaning of the term,—­which he takes to task, twisting a current idea into a paradox, or making use of a hackneyed phrase, or parodying some quotation or proverb.  If we compare these scenes in miniature with one another, we find they are almost always variations of a comic theme with which we are well acquainted, that of the “robber robbed.”  You take up a metaphor, a phrase, an argument, and turn it against the man who is, or might be, its author, so that he is made to say what he did not mean to say and lets himself be caught, to some extent, in the toils of language.  But the theme of the “robber robbed” is not the only possible one.  We have gone over many varieties of the comic, and there is not one of them that is incapable of being volatilised into a witticism.

Every witty remark, then, lends itself to an analysis, whose chemical formula, so to say, we are now in a position to state.  It runs as follows:  Take the remark, first enlarge it into a regular scene, then find out the category of the comic to which the scene evidently belongs:  by this means you reduce the witty remark to its simplest elements and obtain a full explanation of it.

Let us apply this method to a classic example.  “Your chest hurts me” (J’AI MAL A VOTRE POITRINE) wrote Mme. de Sevigne to her ailing daughter—­clearly a witty saying.  If our theory is correct, we need only lay stress upon the saying, enlarge and magnify it, and we shall see it expand into a comic scene.  Now, we find this very scene, ready made, in the AMOUR medecin of Moliere.  The sham doctor, Clitandre, who has been summoned to attend Sganarelle’s daughter, contents himself with feeling Sganarelle’s own pulse, whereupon, relying on the sympathy there must be between father and daughter, he unhesitatingly concludes:  “Your daughter is very ill!” Here we have the transition from the witty to the comical.  To complete our analysis, then, all we have to do is to discover what there is comical in the idea of giving a diagnosis of the child after sounding the father or the mother.  Well, we know that one essential form of comic fancy lies in picturing to ourselves a living person as a kind of jointed dancing-doll, and that frequently, with the object of inducing us to form this mental picture, we are shown two or more persons speaking and acting as though attached to one another by invisible strings.  Is not this the idea here suggested when we are led to materialise, so to speak, the sympathy we postulate as existing between father and daughter?

We now see how it is that writers on wit have perforce confined themselves to commenting on the extraordinary complexity of the things denoted by the term without ever succeeding in defining it.  There are many ways of being witty, almost as many as there are of being the reverse.  How can we detect what they have in common with one another, unless we first determine the general relationship between the witty and the comic?  Once, however, this relationship is cleared up, everything is plain sailing.  We then find the same connection between the comic and the witty as exists between a regular scene and the fugitive suggestion of a possible one.  Hence, however numerous the forms assumed by the comic, wit will possess an equal number of corresponding varieties.  So that the comic, in all its forms, is what should be defined first, by discovering (a task which is already quite difficult enough) the clue that leads from one form to the other.  By that very operation wit will have been analysed, and will then appear as nothing more than the comic in a highly volatile state.  To follow the opposite plan, however, and attempt directly to evolve a formula for wit, would be courting certain failure.  What should we think of a chemist who, having ever so many jars of a certain substance in his laboratory, would prefer getting that substance from the atmosphere, in which merely infinitesimal traces of its vapour are to be found?

But this comparison between the witty and the comic is also indicative of the line we must take in studying the comic in words.  On the one hand, indeed, we find there is no essential difference between a word that is comic and one that is witty; on the other hand, the latter, although connected with a figure of speech, invariably calls up the image, dim or distinct, of a comic scene.  This amounts to saying that the comic in speech should correspond, point by point, with the comic in actions and in situations, and is nothing more, if one may so express oneself, than their projection on to the plane of words.  So let us return to the comic in actions and in situations, consider the chief methods by which it is obtained, and apply them to the choice of words and the building up of sentences.  We shall thus have every possible form of the comic in words as well as every variety of wit.

1.  Inadvertently to say or do what we have no intention of saying or doing, as a result of inelasticity or momentum, is, as we are aware, one of the main sources of the comic.  Thus, absentmindedness is essentially laughable, and so we laugh at anything rigid, ready-made, mechanical in gesture, attitude and even facial expression.  Do we find this kind of rigidity in language also?  No doubt we do, since language contains ready-made formulas and stereotyped phrases.  The man who always expressed himself in such terms would invariably be comic.  But if an isolated phrase is to be comic in itself, when once separated from the person who utters it, it must be something more than ready-made, it must bear within itself some sign which tells us, beyond the possibility of doubt, that it was uttered automatically.  This can only happen when the phrase embodies some evident absurdity, either a palpable error or a contradiction in terms.  Hence the following general rule:  A comic meaning is invariably obtained when an absurd idea is fitted into A well-established phrase-form.

“Ce sabre est le plus beau jour de ma vie,” said M. Prudhomme.  Translate the phrase into English or German and it becomes purely absurd, though it is comic enough in French.  The reason is that “le plus beau jour de ma vie” is one of those ready-made phrase-endings to which a Frenchman’s ear is accustomed.  To make it comic, then, we need only clearly indicate the automatism of the person who utters it.  This is what we get when we introduce an absurdity into the phrase.  Here the absurdity is by no means the source of the comic, it is only a very simple and effective means of making it obvious.

We have quoted only one saying of M. Prudhomme, but the majority of those attributed to him belong to the same class.  M. Prudhomme is a man of ready-made phrases.  And as there are ready-made phrases in all languages, M. Prudhomme is always capable of being transposed, though seldom of being translated.  At times the commonplace phrase, under cover of which the absurdity slips in, is not so readily noticeable.  “I don’t like working between meals,” said a lazy lout.  There would be nothing amusing in the saying did there not exist that salutary precept in the realm of hygiene:  “One should not eat between meals.”

Sometimes, too, the effect is a complicated one.  Instead of one commonplace phrase-form, there are two or three which are dovetailed into each other.  Take, for instance, the remark of one of the characters in a play by Labiche, “Only God has the right to kill His fellow-creature.”  It would seem that advantage is here taken of two separate familiar sayings; “It is God who disposes of the lives of men,” and, “It is criminal for a man to kill his fellow-creature.”  But the two sayings are combined so as to deceive the ear and leave the impression of being one of those hackneyed sentences that are accepted as a matter of course.  Hence our attention nods, until we are suddenly aroused by the absurdity of the meaning.  These examples suffice to show how one of the most important types of the comic can be projected—­in a simplified form—­on the plane of speech.  We will now proceed to a form which is not so general.

2.  “We laugh if our attention is diverted to the physical in a person when it is the moral that is in question,” is a law we laid down in the first part of this work.  Let us apply it to language.  Most words might be said to have a physical and a moral meaning, according as they are interpreted literally or figuratively.  Every word, indeed, begins by denoting a concrete object or a material action; but by degrees the meaning of the word is refined into an abstract relation or a pure idea.  If, then, the above law holds good here, it should be stated as follows:  “A comic effect is obtained whenever we pretend to take literally an expression which was used figuratively”; or, “Once our attention is fixed on the material aspect of a metaphor, the idea expressed becomes comic.”

In the phrase, “Tous les arts sont freres” (all the arts are brothers), the word “frere” (brother) is used metaphorically to indicate a more or less striking resemblance.  The word is so often used in this way, that when we hear it we do not think of the concrete, the material connection implied in every relationship.  We should notice it more if we were told that “Tous les arts sont cousins,” for the word “cousin” is not so often employed in a figurative sense; that is why the word here already assumes a slight tinge of the comic.  But let us go further still, and suppose that our attention is attracted to the material side of the metaphor by the choice of a relationship which is incompatible with the gender of the two words composing the metaphorical expression:  we get a laughable result.  Such is the well-known saying, also attributed to M. Prudhomme, “Tous les arts (masculine) sont soeurs (feminine).”  “He is always running after a joke,” was said in Boufflers’ presence regarding a very conceited fellow.  Had Boufflers replied, “He won’t catch it,” that would have been the beginning of a witty saying, though nothing more than the beginning, for the word “catch” is interpreted figuratively almost as often as the word “run”; nor does it compel us more strongly than the latter to materialise the image of two runners, the one at the heels of the other.  In order that the rejoinder may appear to be a thoroughly witty one, we must borrow from the language of sport an expression so vivid and concrete that we cannot refrain from witnessing the race in good earnest.  This is what Boufflers does when he retorts, “I’ll back the joke!”

We said that wit often consists in extending the idea of one’s interlocutor to the point of making him express the opposite of what he thinks and getting him, so to say, entrapt by his own words.  We must now add that this trap is almost always some metaphor or comparison the concrete aspect of which is turned against him.  You may remember the dialogue between a mother and her son in the Faux Bonshommes:  “My dear boy, gambling on ’Change is very risky.  You win one day and lose the next.”—­“Well, then, I will gamble only every other day.”  In the same play too we find the following edifying conversation between two company-promoters:  “Is this a very honourable thing we are doing?  These unfortunate shareholders, you see, we are taking the money out of their very pockets….”—­“Well, out of what do you expect us to take it?”

An amusing result is likewise obtainable whenever a symbol or an emblem is expanded on its concrete side, and a pretence is made of retaining the same symbolical value for this expansion as for the emblem itself.  In a very lively comedy we are introduced to a Monte Carlo official, whose uniform is covered with medals, although he has only received a single decoration.  “You see, I staked my medal on a number at roulette,” he said, “and as the number turned up, I was entitled to thirty-six times my stake.”  This reasoning is very similar to that offered by Giboyer in the Effrontes.  Criticism is made of a bride of forty summers who is wearing orange-blossoms with her wedding costume:  “Why, she was entitled to oranges, let alone orange-blossoms!” remarked Giboyer.

But we should never cease were we to take one by one all the laws we have stated, and try to prove them on what we have called the plane of language.  We had better confine ourselves to the three general propositions of the preceding section.  We have shown that “series of events” may become comic either by repetition, by inversion, or by reciprocal interference.  Now we shall see that this is also the case with series of words.

To take series of events and repeat them in another key or another environment, or to invert them whilst still leaving them a certain meaning, or mix them up so that their respective meanings jostle one another, is invariably comic, as we have already said, for it is getting life to submit to be treated as a machine.  But thought, too, is a living thing.  And language, the translation of thought, should be just as living.  We may thus surmise that a phrase is likely to become comic if, though reversed, it still makes sense, or if it expresses equally well two quite independent sets of ideas, or, finally, if it has been obtained by transposing an idea into some key other than its own.  Such, indeed, are the three fundamental laws of what might be called the comic transformation of sentences, as we shall show by a few examples.

Let it first be said that these three laws are far from being of equal importance as regards the theory of the ludicrous.  Inversion is the least interesting of the three.  It must be easy of application, however, for it is noticeable that, no sooner do professional wits hear a sentence spoken than they experiment to see if a meaning cannot be obtained by reversing it,—­by putting, for instance, the subject in place of the object, and the object in place of the subject.  It is not unusual for this device to be employed for refuting an idea in more or less humorous terms.  One of the characters in a comedy of Labiche shouts out to his neighbour on the floor above, who is in the habit of dirtying his balcony, “What do you mean by emptying your pipe on to my terrace?” The neighbour retorts, “What do you mean by putting your terrace under my pipe?” There is no necessity to dwell upon this kind of wit, instances of which could easily be multiplied.  The reciprocal interference of two sets of ideas in the same sentence is an inexhaustible source of amusing varieties.  There are many ways of bringing about this interference, I mean of bracketing in the same expression two independent meanings that apparently tally.  The least reputable of these ways is the pun.  In the pun, the same sentence appears to offer two independent meanings, but it is only an appearance; in reality there are two different sentences made up of different words, but claiming to be one and the same because both have the same sound.  We pass from the pun, by imperceptible stages, to the true play upon words.  Here there is really one and the same sentence through which two different sets of ideas are expressed, and we are confronted with only one series of words; but advantage is taken of the different meanings a word may have, especially when used figuratively instead of literally.  So that in fact there is often only a slight difference between the play upon words on the one hand, and a poetic metaphor or an illuminating comparison on the other.  Whereas an illuminating comparison and a striking image always seem to reveal the close harmony that exists between language and nature, regarded as two parallel forms of life, the play upon words makes us think somehow of a negligence on the part of language, which, for the time being, seems to have forgotten its real function and now claims to accommodate things to itself instead of accommodating itself to things.  And so the play upon words always betrays a momentary lapse of attention in language, and it is precisely on that account that it is amusing.

Inversion and reciprocal interference, after all, are only a certain playfulness of the mind which ends at playing upon words.  The comic in transposition is much more far-reaching.  Indeed, transposition is to ordinary language what repetition is to comedy.

We said that repetition is the favourite method of classic comedy.  It consists in so arranging events that a scene is reproduced either between the same characters under fresh circumstances or between fresh characters under the same circumstances.  Thus we have, repeated by lackeys in less dignified language, a scene already played by their masters.  Now, imagine ideas expressed in suitable style and thus placed in the setting of their natural environment.  If you think of some arrangement whereby they are transferred to fresh surroundings, while maintaining their mutual relations, or, in other words, if you can induce them to express themselves in an altogether different style and to transpose themselves into another key, you will have language itself playing a comedy—­language itself made comic.  There will be no need, moreover, actually to set before us both expressions of the same ideas, the transposed expression and the natural one.  For we are acquainted with the natural one—­the one which we should have chosen instinctively.  So it will be enough if the effort of comic invention bears on the other, and on the other alone.  No sooner is the second set before us than we spontaneously supply the first.  Hence the following general rule:  A comic effect is always obtainable by transposing the nature expression of an idea into another key.

The means of transposition are so many and varied, language affords so rich a continuity of themes and the comic is here capable of passing through so great a number of stages, from the most insipid buffoonery up to the loftiest forms of humour and irony, that we shall forego the attempt to make out a complete list.  Having stated the rule, we will simply, here and there, verify its main applications.

In the first place, we may distinguish two keys at the extreme ends of the scale, the solemn and the familiar.  The most obvious effects are obtained by merely transposing the one into the other, which thus provides us with two opposite currents of comic fancy.

Transpose the solemn into the familiar and the result is parody.  The effect of parody, thus defined, extends to instances in which the idea expressed in familiar terms is one that, if only in deference to custom, ought to be pitched in another key.  Take as an example the following description of the dawn, quoted by Jean Paul Richter:  “The sky was beginning to change from black to red, like a lobster being boiled.”  Note that the expression of old-world matters in terms of modern life produces the same effect, by reason of the halo of poetry which surrounds classical antiquity.

It is doubtless the comic in parody that has suggested to some philosophers, and in particular to Alexander Bain, the idea of defining the comic, in general, as a species of degradation.  They describe the laughable as causing something to appear mean that was formerly dignified.  But if our analysis is correct, degradation is only one form of transposition, and transposition itself only one of the means of obtaining laughter.  There is a host of others, and the source of laughter must be sought for much further back.  Moreover, without going so far, we see that while the transposition from solemn to trivial, from better to worse, is comic, the inverse transposition may be even more so.

It is met with as often as the other, and, apparently, we may distinguish two main forms of it, according as it refers to the physical dimensions of an object or to its moral value.

To speak of small things as though they were large is, in a general way, to exaggerate.  Exaggeration is always comic when prolonged, and especially when systematic; then, indeed, it appears as one method of transposition.  It excites so much laughter that some writers have been led to define the comic as exaggeration, just as others have defined it as degradation.  As a matter of fact, exaggeration, like degradation, is only one form of one kind of the comic.  Still, it is a very striking form.  It has given birth to the mock-heroic poem, a rather old-fashioned device, I admit, though traces of it are still to be found in persons inclined to exaggerate methodically.  It might often be said of braggadocio that it is its mock-heroic aspect which makes us laugh.

Far more artificial, but also far more refined, is the transposition upwards from below when applied to the moral value of things, not to their physical dimensions.  To express in reputable language some disreputable idea, to take some scandalous situation, some low-class calling or disgraceful behaviour, and describe them in terms of the utmost “RESPECTABILITY,” is generally comic.  The English word is here purposely employed, as the practice itself is characteristically English.  Many instances of it may be found in Dickens and Thackeray, and in English literature generally.  Let us remark, in passing, that the intensity of the effect does not here depend on its length.  A word is sometimes sufficient, provided it gives us a glimpse of an entire system of transposition accepted in certain social circles and reveals, as it were, a moral organisation of immorality.  Take the following remark made by an official to one of his subordinates in a novel of Gogol’s, “Your peculations are too extensive for an official of your rank.”

Summing up the foregoing, then, there are two extreme terms of comparison, the very large and the very small, the best and the worst, between which transposition may be effected in one direction or the other.  Now, if the interval be gradually narrowed, the contrast between the terms obtained will be less and less violent, and the varieties of comic transposition more and more subtle.

The most common of these contrasts is perhaps that between the real and the ideal, between what is and what ought to be.  Here again transposition may take place in either direction.  Sometimes we state what ought to be done, and pretend to believe that this is just what is actually being done; then we have irony.  Sometimes, on the contrary, we describe with scrupulous minuteness what is being done, and pretend to believe that this is just what ought to be done; such is often the method of humour.  Humour, thus denned, is the counterpart of irony.  Both are forms of satire, but irony is oratorical in its nature, whilst humour partakes of the scientific.  Irony is emphasised the higher we allow ourselves to be uplifted by the idea of the good that ought to be:  thus irony may grow so hot within us that it becomes a kind of high-pressure eloquence.  On the other hand, humour is the more emphasised the deeper we go down into an evil that actually is, in order t o set down its details in the most cold-blooded indifference.  Several authors, Jean Paul amongst them, have noticed that humour delights in concrete terms, technical details, definite facts.  If our analysis is correct, this is not an accidental trait of humour, it is its very essence.  A humorist is a moralist disguised as a scientist, something like an anatomist who practises dissection with the sole object of filling us with disgust; so that humour, in the restricted sense in which we are here regarding the word, is really a transposition from the moral to the scientific.

By still further curtailing the interval between the terms transposed, we may now obtain more and more specialised types of comic transpositions.  Thus, certain professions have a technical vocabulary:  what a wealth of laughable results have been obtained by transposing the ideas of everyday life into this professional jargon!  Equally comic is the extension of business phraseology to the social relations of life,—­for instance, the phrase of one of Labiche’s characters in allusion to an invitation he has received, “Your kindness of the third ult.,” thus transposing the commercial formula, “Your favour of the third instant.”  This class of the comic, moreover, may attain a special profundity of its own when it discloses not merely a professional practice, but a fault in character.  Recall to mind the scenes in the Faux Bonshommes and the Famille Benoiton, where marriage is dealt with as a business affair, and matters of sentiment are set down in strictly commercial language.

Here, however, we reach the point at which peculiarities of language really express peculiarities of character, a closer investigation of which we must hold over to the next chapter.  Thus, as might have been expected and may be seen from the foregoing, the comic in words follows closely on the comic in situation and is finally merged, along with the latter, in the comic in character.  Language only attains laughable results because it is a human product, modelled as exactly as possible on the forms of the human mind.  We feel it contains some living element of our own life; and if this life of language were complete and perfect, if there were nothing stereotype in it, if, in short, language were an absolutely unified organism incapable of being split up into independent organisms, it would evade the comic as would a soul whose life was one harmonious whole, unruffled as the calm surface of a peaceful lake.  There is no pool, however, which has not some dead leaves floating on its surface, no human soul upon which there do not settle habits that make it rigid against itself by making it rigid against others, no language, in short, so subtle and instinct with life, so fully alert in each of its parts as to eliminate the ready-made and oppose the mechanical operations of inversion, transposition, etc., which one would fain perform upon it as on some lifeless thing.  The rigid, the ready—­ made, the mechanical, in contrast with the supple, the ever-changing and the living, absentmindedness in contrast with attention, in a word, automatism in contrast with free activity, such are the defects that laughter singles out and would fain correct.  We appealed to this idea to give us light at the outset, when starting upon the analysis of the ludicrous.  We have seen it shining at every decisive turning in our road.  With its help, we shall now enter upon a more important investigation, one that will, we hope, be more instructive.  We purpose, in short, studying comic characters, or rather determining the essential conditions of comedy in character, while endeavouring to bring it about that this study may contribute to a better understanding of the real nature of art and the general relation between art and life.