Laughter : An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

Eager as we have been to discover the deep-seated cause of the comic, we have so far had to neglect one of its most striking phenomena.  We refer to the logic peculiar to the comic character and the comic group, a strange kind of logic, which, in some cases, may include a good deal of absurdity.

Theophile Gautier said that the comic in its extreme form was the logic of the absurd.  More than one philosophy of laughter revolves round a like idea.  Every comic effect, it is said, implies contradiction in some of its aspects.  What makes us laugh is alleged to be the absurd realised in concrete shape, a “palpable absurdity”;—­or, again, an apparent absurdity, which we swallow for the moment only to rectify it immediately afterwards;—­or, better still, something absurd from one point of view though capable of a natural explanation from another, etc.  All these theories may contain some portion of the truth; but, in the first place, they apply only to certain rather obvious comic effects, and then, even where they do apply, they evidently take no account of the characteristic element of the laughable, that is, the particular kind of absurdity the comic contains when it does contain something absurd.  Is an immediate proof of this desired?  You have only to choose one of these definitions and make up effects in accordance with the formula:  twice out of every three times there will be nothing laughable in the effect obtained.  So we see that absurdity, when met with in the comic, is not absurdity in general.  It is an absurdity of a definite kind.  It does not create the comic; rather, we might say that the comic infuses into it its own particular essence.  It is not a cause, but an effect—­an effect of a very special kind, which reflects the special nature of its cause.  Now, this cause is known to us; consequently we shall have no trouble in understanding the nature of the effect.

Assume, when out for a country walk, that you notice on the top of a hill something that bears a faint resemblance to a large motionless body with revolving arms.  So far you do not know what it is, but you begin to search amongst your ideas—­that is to say, in the present instance, amongst the recollections at your disposal—­for that recollection which will best fit in with what you see.  Almost immediately the image of a windmill comes into your mind:  the object before you is a windmill.  No matter if, before leaving the house, you have just been reading fairy-tales telling of giants with enormous arms; for although common sense consists mainly in being able to remember, it consists even more in being able to forget.  Common sense represents the endeavour of a mind continually adapting itself anew and changing ideas when it changes objects.  It is the mobility of the intelligence conforming exactly to the mobility of things.  It is the moving continuity of our attention to life.  But now, let us take Don Quixote setting out for the wars.  The romances he has been reading all tell of knights encountering, on the way, giant adversaries.  He therefore must needs encounter a giant.  This idea of a giant is a privileged recollection which has taken its abode in his mind and lies there in wait, motionless, watching for an opportunity to sally forth and become embodied in a thing.  It is bent on entering the material world, and so the very first object he sees bearing the faintest resemblance to a giant is invested with the form of one.  Thus Don Quixote sees giants where we see windmills.  This is comical; it is also absurd.  But is it a mere absurdity,—­an absurdity of an indefinite kind?

It is a very special inversion of common sense.  It consists in seeking to mould things on an idea of one’s own, instead of moulding one’s ideas on things,—­in seeing before us what we are thinking of, instead of thinking of what we see.  Good sense would have us leave all our memories in their proper rank and file; then the appropriate memory will every time answer the summons of the situation of the moment and serve only to interpret it.  But in Don Quixote, on the contrary, there is one group of memories in command of all the rest and dominating the character itself:  thus it is reality that now has to bow to imagination, its only function being to supply fancy with a body.  Once the illusion has been created, Don Quixote develops it logically enough in all its consequences; he proceeds with the certainty and precision of a somnambulist who is acting his dream.  Such, then, is the origin of his delusions, and such the particular logic which controls this particular absurdity.  Now, is this logic peculiar to Don Quixote?

We have shown that the comic character always errs through obstinacy of mind or of disposition, through absentmindedness, in short, through automatism.  At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity which compels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straight along, to shut their ears and refuse to listen.  In Moliere’s plays how many comic scenes can be reduced to this simple type:  A character following up his one idea, and continually recurring to it in spite of incessant interruptions!  The transition seems to take place imperceptibly from the man who will listen to nothing to the one who will see nothing, and from this latter to the one who sees only what he wants to see.  A stubborn spirit ends by adjusting things to its own way of thinking, instead of accommodating its thoughts to the things.  So every comic character is on the highroad to the above-mentioned illusion, and Don Quixote furnishes us with the general type of comic absurdity.

Is there a name for this inversion of common sense?  Doubtless it may be found, in either an acute or a chronic form, in certain types of insanity.  In many of its aspects it resembles a fixed idea.  But neither insanity in general, nor fixed ideas in particular, are provocative of laughter:  they are diseases, and arouse our pity.

Laughter, as we have seen, is incompatible with emotion.  If there exists a madness that is laughable, it can only be one compatible with the general health of the mind,—­a sane type of madness, one might say.  Now, there is a sane state of the mind that resembles madness in every respect, in which we find the same associations of ideas as we do in lunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed idea.  This state is that of dreams.  So either our analysis is incorrect, or it must be capable of being stated in the following theorem:  Comic absurdity is of the same nature as that of dreams.

The behaviour of the intellect in a dream is exactly what we have just been describing.  The mind, enamoured of itself, now seeks in the outer world nothing more than a pretext for realising its imaginations.  A confused murmur of sounds still reaches the ear, colours enter the field of vision, the senses are not completely shut in.  But the dreamer, instead of appealing to the whole of his recollections for the interpretation of what his senses perceive, makes use of what he perceives to give substance to the particular recollection he favours:  thus, according to the mood of the dreamer and the idea that fills his imagination at the time, a gust of wind blowing down the chimney becomes the howl of a wild beast or a tuneful melody.  Such is the ordinary mechanism of illusion in dreams.

Now, if comic illusion is similar to dream illusion, if the logic of the comic is the logic of dreams, we may expect to discover in the logic of the laughable all the peculiarities of dream logic.  Here, again, we shall find an illustration of the law with which we are well acquainted:  given one form of the laughable, other forms that are lacking in the same comic essence become laughable from their outward resemblance to the first.  Indeed, it is not difficult to see that any play of ideas may afford us amusement if only it bring back to mind, more or less distinctly, the play of dreamland.

We shall first call attention to a certain general relaxation of the rules of reasoning.  The reasonings at which we laugh are those we know to be false, but which we might accept as true were we to hear them in a dream.  They counterfeit true reasoning just sufficiently to deceive a mind dropping off to sleep.  There is still an element of logic in them, if you will, but it is a logic lacking in tension and, for that very reason, affording us relief from intellectual effort.  Many “witticisms” are reasonings of this kind, considerably abridged reasonings, of which we are given only the beginning and the end.  Such play upon ideas evolves in the direction of a play upon words in proportion as the relations set up between the ideas become more superficial:  gradually we come to take no account of the meaning of the words we hear, but only of their sound.  It might be instructive to compare with dreams certain comic scenes in which one of the characters systematically repeats in a nonsensical fashion what another character whispers in his ear.  If you fall asleep with people talking round you, you sometimes find that what they say gradually becomes devoid of meaning, that the sounds get distorted, as it were, and recombine in a haphazard fashion to form in your mind the strangest of meanings, and that you are reproducing between yourself and the different speakers the scene between Petit-Jean and The Prompter. [Footnote:  Les Plaideurs (Racine).]

There are also comic obsessions that seem to bear a great resemblance to dream obsessions.  Who has not had the experience of seeing the same image appear in several successive dreams, assuming a plausible meaning in each of them, whereas these dreams had no other point in common.  Effects of repetition sometimes present this special form on the stage or in fiction:  some of them, in fact, sound as though they belonged to a dream.  It may be the same with the burden of many a song:  it persistently recurs, always unchanged, at the end of every verse, each time with a different meaning.

Not infrequently do we notice in dreams a particular CRESCENDO, a weird effect that grows more pronounced as we proceed.  The first concession extorted from reason introduces a second; and this one, another of a more serious nature; and so on till the crowning absurdity is reached.  Now, this progress towards the absurd produces on the dreamer a very peculiar sensation.  Such is probably the experience of the tippler when he feels himself pleasantly drifting into a state of blankness in which neither reason nor propriety has any meaning for him.  Now, consider whether some of Moliere’s plays would not produce the same sensation:  for instance, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, which, after beginning almost reasonably, develops into a sequence of all sorts of absurdities.  Consider also the Bourgeois gentilhomme, where the different characters seem to allow themselves to be caught up in a very whirlwind of madness as the play proceeds.  “If it is possible to find a man more completely mad, I will go and publish it in Rome.”  This sentence, which warns us that the play is over, rouses us from the increasingly extravagant dream into which, along with M. Jourdain, we have been sinking.

But, above all, there is a special madness that is peculiar to dreams.  There are certain special contradictions so natural to the imagination of a dreamer, and so absurd to the reason of a man wide-awake, that it would be impossible to give a full and correct idea of their nature to anyone who had not experienced them.  We allude to the strange fusion that a dream often effects between two persons who henceforth form only one and yet remain distinct.  Generally one of these is the dreamer himself.  He feels he has not ceased to be what he is; yet he has become someone else.  He is himself, and not himself.  He hears himself speak and sees himself act, but he feels that some other “he” has borrowed his body and stolen his voice.  Or perhaps he is conscious of speaking and acting as usual, but he speaks of himself as a stranger with whom he has nothing in common; he has stepped out of his own self.  Does it not seem as though we found this same extraordinary confusion in many a comic scene?  I am not speaking of Amphitryon, in which play the confusion is perhaps suggested to the mind of the spectator, though the bulk of the comic effect proceeds rather from what we have already called a “reciprocal interference of two series.”  I am speaking of the extravagant and comic reasonings in which we really meet with this confusion in its pure form, though it requires some looking into to pick it out.  For instance, listen to Mark Twain’s replies to the reporter who called to interview him: 

Question.  Isn’t that a brother of yours?  ANSWER.  Oh! yes, yes, yes!  Now you remind me of it, that was a brother of mine.  That’s William—Bill we called him.  Poor old Bill!

Q. Why?  Is he dead, then?  A. Ah! well, I suppose so.  We never could tell.  There was a great mystery about it.

Q. That is sad, very sad.  He disappeared, then?  A. Well, yes, in a sort of general way.  We buried him.

Q. Buried him!  Buried him, without knowing whether he was dead or not?  A. Oh no!  Not that.  He was dead enough.

Q. Well, I confess that I can’t understand this.  If you buried him, and you knew he was dead—­A.  No! no!  We only thought he was.

Q. Oh, I see!  He came to life again?  A. I bet he didn’t.

Q. Well, I never heard anything like this.  SOMEBODY was dead.  SOMEBODY was buried.  Now, where was the mystery?  A. Ah! that’s just it!  That’s it exactly.  You see, we were twins,—­defunct and I,—­and we got mixed in the bath-tub when we were only two weeks old, and one of us was drowned.  But we didn’t know which.  Some think it was Bill.  Some think it was me.

Q. Well, that is remarkable.  What do you think?  A. Goodness knows!  I would give whole worlds to know.  This solemn, this awful tragedy has cast a gloom over my whole life.  But I will tell you a secret now, which I have never revealed to any creature before.  One of us had a peculiar mark,—­a large mole on the back of his left hand:  that was me.  That child was the one that was drowned! ... etc., etc.

A close examination will show us that the absurdity of this dialogue is by no means an absurdity of an ordinary type.  It would disappear were not the speaker himself one of the twins in the story.  It results entirely from the fact that Mark Twain asserts he is one of these twins, whilst all the time he talks as though he were a third person who tells the tale.  In many of our dreams we adopt exactly the same method.