“Trente et quarante” is a gambling game.
Footnote 77:
Bergson, l. c., p. 29.
Footnote 78:
Sixth Ed., Berlin, 1891.
Footnote 79:
“You may well laugh, that no longer concerns you.”
Footnote 80:
That comic pleasure has its source in the “quantitative contrast,” in
the comparison of big and small, which ultimately also expresses the
essential relation of the child to the grown-up, would indeed be a
peculiar coincidence if the comic had nothing else to do with the
infantile.
Footnote 81:
“Our heads have the right to fall covered before thee.”
Footnote 82:
The excellent humoristic effect of a character like that of the fat
knight, Sir John Falstaff, is based on economised contempt and
indignation. To be sure we recognise in him the unworthy glutton and
fashionably dressed swindler, but our condemnation is disarmed through
a whole series of factors. We understand that he knows himself to be
just as we estimate him; he impresses us through his wit; and besides
that, his physical deformity produces a contact-effect in favor of a
comic conception of his personality instead of a serious one; as if
our demands for morality and honor must recoil from such a big
stomach. His activities are altogether harmless and are almost excused
by the comic lowness of those he deceives. We admit that the poor
devil has a right to live and enjoy himself like any one else, and we
almost pity him because in the principal situation we find him a
puppet in the hands of one much his superior. It is for this reason
that we cannot bear him any grudge and turn all we economize in him in
indignation into comic pleasure which he otherwise provides. Sir
John’s own humor really emanates from the superiority of an ego which
neither his physical nor his moral defects can rob of its joviality
and security.
On the other hand the courageous knight Don Quixote de la Mancha is a
figure who possesses no humor, and in his seriousness furnishes us a
pleasure which can be called humoristic although its mechanism shows a
decided deviation from that of humor. Originally Don Quixote is a
purely comic figure, a big child whose fancies from his books on
knighthood have gone to his head. It is known that at first the poet
wanted to show only that phase of his character, and that the creation
gradually outgrew the author’s original intentions. But after the poet
endowed this ludicrous person with the profoundest wisdom and noblest
aims and made him the symbolic representation of an idealism, a man
who believed in the realization of his aims, who took duties seriously
and promises literally, he ceased to be a comic personality. Like
humoristic pleasure which results from a prevention of emotional
feelings it originates here through the disturbance of comic pleasure.
However, in these examples we already depart perceptibly from the
simple cases of humor.
Footnote 83:
A term which is used in quite a different sense in the _Aesthetik_ of
Theo. Vischer.
Footnote 84:
If one does not hesitate to do some violence to the conception of
expectation, one may ascribe—according to the process of Lipps—a very
large sphere of the comic to the comic of expectation; but probably
the most original cases of the comic which result through a comparison
of a strange expenditure with one’s own will fit least into this
conception.
Footnote 85:
The characteristic of the “double face” naturally did not escape the
authors. Melinaud, from whom I borrowed the above expression,
conceives the condition for laughing in the following formula: “Ce qui
fait rire c’est qui est à la fois, d’un coté, absurde et de l’autre,
familier” (“Pourquoi rit-on?” _Revue de deux mondes_, February, 1895).
This formula fits in better with wit than with the comic, but it
really does not altogether cover the former. Bergson (l. c., p. 96)
defines the comic situation by the “reciprocal interference of
series,” and states: “A situation is invariably comic when it belongs
simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is
capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the
same time.” According to Lipps the comic is “the greatness and
smallness of the same.”
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last
chapter.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.