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LAUGHTER
AN ESSAY ON THE MEANING OF THE COMIC
BY HENRI BERGSON
MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE
AUTHORISED TRANSLATION
BY CLOUDESLEY BRERETON L. ES L. (PARIS), M.A. (CANTAB) AND FRED
ROTHWELL B.A. (LONDON)
TRANSLATORS' PREFACE
This work, by Professor Bergson, has been revised in detail by the
author himself, and the present translation is the only authorised one.
For this ungrudging labour of revision, for the thoroughness with which
it has been carried out, and for personal sympathy in many a difficulty
of word and phrase, we desire to offer our grateful acknowledgment to
Professor Bergson. It may be pointed out that the essay on Laughter
originally appeared in a series of three articles in one of the leading
magazines in France, the Revue de Paris. This will account for the
relatively simple form of the work and the comparative absence of
technical terms. It will also explain why the author has confined
himself to exposing and illustrating his novel theory of the comic
without entering into a detailed discussion of other explanations
already in the field. He none the less indicates, when discussing
sundry examples, why the principal theories, to which they have given
rise, appear to him inadequate. To quote only a few, one may mention
those based on contrast, exaggeration, and degradation.
The book has been highly successful in France, where it is in its
seventh edition. It has been translated into Russian, Polish, and
Swedish. German and Hungarian translations are under preparation. Its
success is due partly to the novelty of the explanation offered of the
comic, and partly also to the fact that the author incidentally
discusses questions of still greater interest and importance. Thus, one
of the best known and most frequently quoted passages of the book is
that portion of the last chapter in which the author outlines a general
theory of art.
C. B. F. R.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE COMIC IN GENERAL--THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS AND
MOVEMENTS--EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC
CHAPTER II
THE COMIC ELEMENT IN SITUATIONS AND THE COMIC ELEMENT IN WORDS
CHAPTER III
THE COMIC IN CHARACTER
CHAPTER I
THE COMIC IN GENERAL--THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS AND
MOVEMENTS--EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC.
What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable?
What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a
play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a scene of
high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us invariably the
same essence from which so many different products borrow either their
obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers,
from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem, which has a
knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to
bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation. Our
excuse for attacking the problem in our turn must lie in the fact that
we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition.
We regard it, above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be,
we shall treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine
ourselves to watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible
gradations from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the
strangest metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybe
we may gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that,
something more flexible than an abstract definition,--a practical,
intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship. And
maybe we may also find that, unintentionally, we have made an
acquaintance that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of its
own, even in its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its
madness. It dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions
that are at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social
group. Can it then fail to throw light for us on the way that human
imagination works, and more particularly social, collective, and
popular imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it
not also have something of its own to tell us about art and life?
At the outset we shall put forward three observations which we look
upon as fundamental. They have less bearing on the actually comic than
on the field within which it must be sought.
I
The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic
does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A landscape
may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it
will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because
you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may
laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not
the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,--the
human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that so
important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a
greater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have defined man
as "an animal which laughs." They might equally well have defined him
as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some
lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some
resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.
Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the
ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as
though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it
fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and
unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no
greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a
person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection,
but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of
court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure
intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps
there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune
and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally
prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.
Try, for a moment, to become interested in everything that is being
said and done; act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel with
those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as
though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of
objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now
step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama
will turn into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the
sound of music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers at
once to appear ridiculous. How many human actions would stand a similar
test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to gay,
on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To produce
the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a
momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure
and simple.
This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other
intelligences. And here is the third fact to which attention should be
drawn. You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself
isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo,
Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined
sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating
from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in
successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this
reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a
circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one.
Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. It may, perchance, have
happened to you, when seated in a railway carriage or at table d'hote,
to hear travellers relating to one another stories which must have been
comic to them, for they laughed heartily. Had you been one of their
company, you would have laughed like them; but, as you were not, you
had no desire whatever to do so. A man who was once asked why he did
not weep at a sermon, when everybody else was shedding tears, replied:
"I don't belong to the parish!" What that man thought of tears would be
still more true of laughter. However spontaneous it seems, laughter
always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with
other laughers, real or imaginary. How often has it been said that the
fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience!
On the other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comic
effects are incapable of translation from one language to another,
because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social
group! It is through not understanding the importance of this double
fact that the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity in which
the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange, isolated
phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human activity. Hence
those definitions which tend to make the comic into an abstract
relation between ideas: "an intellectual contrast," "a palpable
absurdity," etc.,--definitions which, even were they really suitable to
every form of the comic, would not in the least explain why the comic
makes us laugh. How, indeed, should it come about that this particular
logical relation, as soon as it is perceived, contracts, expands and
shakes our limbs, whilst all other relations leave the body unaffected?
It is not from this point of view that we shall approach the problem.
To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural
environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the
utility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say at
once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must
answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL
signification.
Let us clearly mark the point towards which our three preliminary
observations are converging. The comic will come into being, it
appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of
their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play
nothing but their intelligence. What, now, is the particular point on
which their attention will have to be concentrated, and what will here
be the function of intelligence? To reply to these questions will be at
once to come to closer grips with the problem. But here a few examples
have become indispensable.
II
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.
III
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.
IV
We will now pass from the comic element in FORMS to that in GESTURES
and MOVEMENTS. Let us at once state the law which seems to govern all
the phenomena of this kind. It may indeed be deduced without any
difficulty from the considerations stated above. THE ATTITUDES,
GESTURES AND MOVEMENTS OF THE HUMAN BODY ARE LAUGHABLE IN EXACT
PROPORTION AS THAT BODY REMINDS US OF A MERE MACHINE. There is no need
to follow this law through the details of its immediate applications,
which are innumerable. To verify it directly, it would be sufficient to
study closely the work of comic artists, eliminating entirely the
element of caricature, and omitting that portion of the comic which is
not inherent in the drawing itself. For, obviously, the comic element
in a drawing is often a borrowed one, for which the text supplies all
the stock-in-trade. I mean that the artist may be his own understudy in
the shape of a satirist, or even a playwright, and that then we laugh
far less at the drawings themselves than at the satire or comic
incident they represent. But if we devote our whole attention to the
drawing with the firm resolve to think of nothing else, we shall
probably find that it is generally comic in proportion to the
clearness, as well as the subtleness, with which it enables us to see a
man as a jointed puppet. The suggestion must be a clear one, for inside
the person we must distinctly perceive, as though through a glass, a
set-up mechanism. But the suggestion must also be a subtle one, for the
general appearance of the person, whose every limb has been made rigid
as a machine, must continue to give us the impression of a living
being. The more exactly these two images, that of a person and that of
a machine, fit into each other, the more striking is the comic effect,
and the more consummate the art of the draughtsman. The originality of
a comic artist is thus expressed in the special kind of life he imparts
to a mere puppet.
We will, however, leave on one side the immediate application of the
principle, and at this point insist only on the more remote
consequences. The illusion of a machine working in the inside of the
person is a thing that only crops up amid a host of amusing effects;
but for the most part it is a fleeting glimpse, that is immediately
lost in the laughter it provokes. To render it permanent, analysis and
reflection must be called into play.
In a public speaker, for instance, we find that gesture vies with
speech. Jealous of the latter, gesture closely dogs the speaker's
thought, demanding also to act as interpreter. Well and good; but then
it must pledge itself to follow thought through all the phases of its
development. An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms and ripens
from the beginning to the end of a speech. It never halts, never
repeats itself. It must be changing every moment, for to cease to
change would be to cease to live. Then let gesture display a like
animation! Let it accept the fundamental law of life, which is the
complete negation of repetition! But I find that a certain movement of
head or arm, a movement always the same, seems to return at regular
intervals. If I notice it and it succeeds in diverting my attention, if
I wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it, then
involuntarily I laugh. Why? Because I now have before me a machine that
works automatically. This is no longer life, it is automatism
established in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic.
This is also the reason why gestures, at which we never dreamt of
laughing, become laughable when imitated by another individual. The
most elaborate explanations have been offered for this extremely simple
fact. A little reflection, however, will show that our mental state is
ever changing, and that if our gestures faithfully followed these inner
movements, if they were as fully alive as we, they would never repeat
themselves, and so would keep imitation at bay. We begin, then, to
become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves. I mean our gestures
can only be imitated in their mechanical uniformity, and therefore
exactly in what is alien to our living personality. To imitate any one
is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into
his person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no
wonder that imitation gives rise to laughter.
Still, if the imitation of gestures is intrinsically laughable, it will
become even more so when it busies itself in deflecting them, though
without altering their form, towards some mechanical occupation, such
as sawing wood, striking on an anvil, or tugging away at an imaginary
bell-rope. Not that vulgarity is the essence of the comic,--although
certainly it is to some extent an ingredient,--but rather that the
incriminated gesture seems more frankly mechanical when it can be
connected with a simple operation, as though it were intentionally
mechanical. To suggest this mechanical interpretation ought to be one
of the favourite devices of parody. We have reached this result through
deduction, but I imagine clowns have long had an intuition of the fact.
This seems to me the solution of the little riddle propounded by Pascal
in one passage of his Thoughts: "Two faces that are alike, although
neither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh when
together, on account of their likeness." It might just as well be said:
"The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by
itself, excite laughter by their repetition." The truth is that a
really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever there is
repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at
work behind the living. Analyse the impression you get from two faces
that are too much alike, and you will find that you are thinking of two
copies cast in the same mould, or two impressions of the same seal, or
two reproductions of the same negative,--in a word, of some
manufacturing process or other. This deflection of life towards the
mechanical is here the real cause of laughter.
And laughter will be more pronounced still, if we find on the stage not
merely two characters, as in the example from Pascal, but several, nay,
as great a number as possible, the image of one another, who come and
go, dance and gesticulate together, simultaneously striking the same
attitudes and tossing their arms about in the same manner. This time,
we distinctly think of marionettes. Invisible threads seem to us to be
joining arms to arms, legs to legs, each muscle in one face to its
fellow-muscle in the other: by reason of the absolute uniformity which
prevails, the very litheness of the bodies seems to stiffen as we gaze,
and the actors themselves seem transformed into automata. Such, at
least, appears to be the artifice underlying this somewhat obvious form
of amusement. I daresay the performers have never read Pascal, but what
they do is merely to realise to the full the suggestions contained in
Pascal's words. If, as is undoubtedly the case, laughter is caused in
the second instance by the hallucination of a mechanical effect, it
must already have been so, though in more subtle fashion, in the first.
Continuing along this path, we dimly perceive the increasingly
important and far-reaching consequences of the law we have just stated.
We faintly catch still more fugitive glimpses of mechanical effects,
glimpses suggested by man's complex actions, no longer merely by his
gestures. We instinctively feel that the usual devices of comedy, the
periodical repetition of a word or a scene, the systematic inversion of
the parts, the geometrical development of a farcical misunderstanding,
and many other stage contrivances, must derive their comic force from
the same source,--the art of the playwright probably consisting in
setting before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human events,
while carefully preserving an outward aspect of probability and thereby
retaining something of the suppleness of life. But we must not
forestall results which will be duly disclosed in the course of our
analysis.
V
Before going further, let us halt a moment and glance around. As we
hinted at the outset of this study, it would be idle to attempt to
derive every comic effect from one simple formula. The formula exists
well enough in a certain sense, but its development does not follow a
straightforward course. What I mean is that the process of deduction
ought from time to time to stop and study certain culminating effects,
and that these effects each appear as models round which new effects
resembling them take their places in a circle. These latter are not
deductions from the formula, but are comic through their relationship
with those that are. To quote Pascal again, I see no objection, at this
stage, to defining the process by the curve which that geometrician
studied under the name of roulette or cycloid,--the curve traced by a
point in the circumference of a wheel when the carriage is advancing in
a straight line: this point turns like the wheel, though it advances
like the carriage. Or else we might think of an immense avenue such as
are to be seen in the forest of Fontainebleau, with crosses at
intervals to indicate the cross-ways: at each of these we shall walk
round the cross, explore for a while the paths that open out before us,
and then return to our original course. Now, we have just reached one
of these mental crossways. Something mechanical encrusted on the
living, will represent a cross at which we must halt, a central image
from which the imagination branches off in different directions. What
are these directions? There appear to be three main ones. We will
follow them one after the other, and then continue our onward course.
1. In the first place, this view of the mechanical and the living
dovetailed into each other makes us incline towards the vaguer image of
SOME RIGIDITY OR OTHER applied to the mobility of life, in an awkward
attempt to follow its lines and counterfeit its suppleness. Here we
perceive how easy it is for a garment to become ridiculous. It might
almost be said that every fashion is laughable in some respect. Only,
when we are dealing with the fashion of the day, we are so accustomed
to it that the garment seems, in our mind, to form one with the
individual wearing it. We do not separate them in imagination. The idea
no longer occurs to us to contrast the inert rigidity of the covering
with the living suppleness of the object covered: consequently, the
comic here remains in a latent condition. It will only succeed in
emerging when the natural incompatibility is so deep-seated between the
covering and the covered that even an immemorial association fails to
cement this union: a case in point is our head and top hat. Suppose,
however, some eccentric individual dresses himself in the fashion of
former times: our attention is immediately drawn to the clothes
themselves, we absolutely distinguish them from the individual, we say
that the latter IS DISGUISING HIMSELF,--as though every article of
clothing were not a disguise!--and the laughable aspect of fashion
comes out of the shadow into the light.
Here we are beginning to catch a faint glimpse of the highly intricate
difficulties raised by this problem of the comic. One of the reasons
that must have given rise to many erroneous or unsatisfactory theories
of laughter is that many things are comic de jure without being comic
de facto, the continuity of custom having deadened within them the
comic quality. A sudden dissolution of continuity is needed, a break
with fashion, for this quality to revive. Hence the impression that
this dissolution of continuity is the parent of the comic, whereas all
it does is to bring it to our notice. Hence, again, the explanation of
laughter by surprise, contrast, etc., definitions which would equally
apply to a host of cases in which we have no inclination whatever to
laugh. The truth of the matter is far from being so simple. But to
return to our idea of disguise, which, as we have just shown, has been
entrusted with the special mandate of arousing laughter. It will not be
out of place to investigate the uses it makes of this power.
Why do we laugh at a head of hair which has changed from dark to blond?
What is there comic about a rubicund nose? And why does one laugh at a
negro? The question would appear to be an embarrassing one, for it has
been asked by successive psychologists such as Hecker, Kraepelin and
Lipps, and all have given different replies. And yet I rather fancy the
correct answer was suggested to me one day in the street by an ordinary
cabby, who applied the expression "unwashed" to the negro fare he was
driving. Unwashed! Does not this mean that a black face, in our
imagination, is one daubed over with ink or soot? If so, then a red
nose can only be one which has received a coating of vermilion. And so
we see that the notion of disguise has passed on something of its comic
quality to instances in which there is actually no disguise, though
there might be.
In the former set of examples, although his usual dress was distinct
from the individual, it appeared in our mind to form one with him,
because we had become accustomed to the sight. In the latter, although
the black or red colour is indeed inherent in the skin, we look upon it
as artificially laid on, because it surprises us.
But here we meet with a fresh crop of difficulties in the theory of the
comic. Such a proposition as the following: "My usual dress forms part
of my body" is absurd in the eyes of reason. Yet imagination looks upon
it as true. "A red nose is a painted nose," "A negro is a white man in
disguise," are also absurd to the reason which rationalises; but they
are gospel truths to pure imagination. So there is a logic of the
imagination which is not the logic of reason, one which at times is
even opposed to the latter,--with which, however, philosophy must
reckon, not only in the study of the comic, but in every other
investigation of the same kind. It is something like the logic of
dreams, though of dreams that have not been left to the whim of
individual fancy, being the dreams dreamt by the whole of society. In
order to reconstruct this hidden logic, a special kind of effort is
needed, by which the outer crust of carefully stratified judgments and
firmly established ideas will be lifted, and we shall behold in the
depths of our mind, like a sheet of subterranean water, the flow of an
unbroken stream of images which pass from one into another. This
interpenetration of images does not come about by chance. It obeys
laws, or rather habits, which hold the same relation to imagination
that logic does to thought.
Let us then follow this logic of the imagination in the special case in
hand. A man in disguise is comic. A man we regard as disguised is also
comic. So, by analogy, any disguise is seen to become comic, not only
that of a man, but that of society also, and even the disguise of
nature.
Let us start with nature. You laugh at a dog that is half-clipped, at a
bed of artificially coloured flowers, at a wood in which the trees are
plastered over with election addresses, etc. Look for the reason, and
you will see that you are once more thinking of a masquerade. Here,
however, the comic element is very faint; it is too far from its
source. If you wish to strengthen it, you must go back to the source
itself and contrast the derived image, that of a masquerade, with the
original one, which, be it remembered, was that of a mechanical
tampering with life. In "a nature that is mechanically tampered with"
we possess a thoroughly comic theme, on which fancy will be able to
play ever so many variations with the certainty of successfully
provoking the heartiest hilarity. You may call to mind that amusing
passage in Tartarin Sur Les Alpes, in which Bompard makes Tartarin--and
therefore also the reader to some slight extent--accept the idea of a
Switzerland choke-full of machinery like the basement of the opera, and
run by a company which maintains a series of waterfalls, glaciers and
artificial crevasses. The same theme reappears, though transposed in
quite another key, in the Novel Notes of the English humorist, Jerome
K. Jerome. An elderly Lady Bountiful, who does not want her deeds of
charity to take up too much of her time, provides homes within easy
hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been
specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest
folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of
their failing, etc. There are comic phrases in which this theme is
audible, like a distant echo, coupled with an ingenuousness, whether
sincere or affected, which acts as accompaniment. Take, as an instance,
the remark made by a lady whom Cassini, the astronomer, had invited to
see an eclipse of the moon. Arriving too late, she said, "M. de
Cassini, I know, will have the goodness to begin it all over again, to
please me." Or, take again the exclamation of one of Gondiinet's
characters on arriving in a town and learning that there is an extinct
volcano in the neighbourhood, "They had a volcano, and they have let it
go out!"
Let us go on to society. As we are both in and of it, we cannot help
treating it as a living being. Any image, then, suggestive of the
notion of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade, so to
speak, will be laughable. Now, such a notion is formed when we perceive
anything inert or stereotyped, or simply ready-made, on the surface of
living society. There we have rigidity over again, clashing with the
inner suppleness of life. The ceremonial side of social life must,
therefore, always include a latent comic element, which is only waiting
for an opportunity to burst into full view. It might be said that
ceremonies are to the social body what clothing is to the individual
body: they owe their seriousness to the fact that they are identified,
in our minds, with the serious object with which custom associates
them, and when we isolate them in imagination, they forthwith lose
their seriousness. For any ceremony, then, to become comic, it is
enough that our attention be fixed on the ceremonial element in it, and
that we neglect its matter, as philosophers say, and think only of its
form. Every one knows how easily the comic spirit exercises its
ingenuity on social actions of a stereotyped nature, from an ordinary
prize-distribution to the solemn sitting of a court of justice. Any
form or formula is a ready-made frame into which the comic element may
be fitted.
Here, again, the comic will be emphasised by bringing it nearer to its
source. From the idea of travesty, a derived one, we must go back to
the original idea, that of a mechanism superposed upon life. Already,
the stiff and starched formality of any ceremonial suggests to us an
image of this kind. For, as soon as we forget the serious object of a
solemnity or a ceremony, those taking part in it give us the impression
of puppets in motion. Their mobility seems to adopt as a model the
immobility of a formula. It becomes automatism. But complete automatism
is only reached in the official, for instance, who performs his duty
like a mere machine, or again in the unconsciousness that marks an
administrative regulation working with inexorable fatality, and setting
itself up for a law of nature. Quite by chance, when reading the
newspaper, I came across a specimen of the comic of this type. Twenty
years ago, a large steamer was wrecked off the coast at Dieppe. With
considerable difficulty some of the passengers were rescued in a boat.
A few custom-house officers, who had courageously rushed to their
assistance, began by asking them "if they had anything to declare." We
find something similar, though the idea is a more subtle one, in the
remark of an M.P. when questioning the Home Secretary on the morrow of
a terrible murder which took place in a railway carriage: "The
assassin, after despatching his victim, must have got out the wrong
side of the train, thereby infringing the Company's rules."
A mechanical element introduced into nature and an automatic regulation
of society, such, then, are the two types of laughable effects at which
we have arrived. It remains for us, in conclusion, to combine them and
see what the result will be.
The result of the combination will evidently be a human regulation of
affairs usurping the place of the laws of nature. We may call to mind
the answer Sganarelle gave Geronte when the latter remarked that the
heart was on the left side and the liver on the right: "Yes, it was so
formerly, but we have altered all that; now, we practise medicine in
quite a new way." We may also recall the consultation between M. de
Pourceaugnac's two doctors: "The arguments you have used are so erudite
and elegant that it is impossible for the patient not to be
hypochondriacally melancholic; or, even if he were not, he must surely
become so because of the elegance of the things you have said and the
accuracy of your reasoning." We might multiply examples, for all we
need do would be to call up Moliere's doctors, one after the other.
However far, moreover, comic fancy may seem to go, reality at times
undertakes to improve upon it. It was suggested to a contemporary
philosopher, an out-and-out arguer, that his arguments, though
irreproachable in their deductions, had experience against them. He put
an end to the discussion by merely remarking, "Experience is in the
wrong." The truth is, this idea of regulating life as a matter of
business routine is more widespread than might be imagined; it is
natural in its way, although we have just obtained it by an artificial
process of reconstruction. One might say that it gives us the very
quintessence of pedantry, which, at bottom, is nothing else than art
pretending to outdo nature.
To sum up, then, we have one and the same effect, which assumes ever
subtler forms as it passes from the idea of an artificial MECHANISATION
of the human body, if such an expression is permissible, to that of any
substitution whatsoever of the artificial for the natural. A less and
less rigorous logic, that more and more resembles the logic of
dreamland, transfers the same relationship into higher and higher
spheres, between increasingly immaterial terms, till in the end we find
a mere administrative enactment occupying the same relation to a
natural or moral law that a ready-made garment, for instance, does to
the living body. We have now gone right to the end of the first of the
three directions we had to follow. Let us turn to the second and see
where it will lead us.
2. Our starting-point is again "something mechanical encrusted upon the
living." Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from the
fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine. Accordingly, it
seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of
suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. But
this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body.
It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher
principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. When
we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is
because we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and,
in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of its
vitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principle
of intellectual and moral life, Let us suppose, however, that our
attention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far from
sharing in the lightness and subtlety of the principle with which it is
animated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersome
vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to earth a soul
eager to rise aloft. Then the body will become to the soul what, as we
have just seen, the garment was to the body itself--inert matter dumped
down upon living energy. The impression of the comic will be produced
as soon as we have a clear apprehension of this putting the one on the
other. And we shall experience it most strongly when we are shown the
soul TANTALISED by the needs of the body: on the one hand, the moral
personality with its intelligently varied energy, and, on the other,
the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with
its machine-like obstinacy. The more paltry and uniformly repeated
these claims of the body, the more striking will be the result. But
that is only a matter of degree, and the general law of these phenomena
may be formulated as follows: ANY INCIDENT IS COMIC THAT CALLS OUR
ATTENTION TO THE PHYSICAL IN A PERSON WHEN IT IS THE MORAL SIDE THAT IS
CONCERNED.
Why do we laugh at a public speaker who sneezes just at the most
pathetic moment of his speech? Where lies the comic element in this
sentence, taken from a funeral speech and quoted by a German
philosopher: "He was virtuous and plump"? It lies in the fact that our
attention is suddenly recalled from the soul to the body. Similar
instances abound in daily life, but if you do not care to take the
trouble to look for them, you have only to open at random a volume of
Labiche, and you will be almost certain to light upon an effect of this
kind. Now, we have a speaker whose most eloquent sentences are cut
short by the twinges of a bad tooth; now, one of the characters who
never begins to speak without stopping in the middle to complain of his
shoes being too small, or his belt too tight, etc. A PERSON EMBARRASSED
BY HIS BODY is the image suggested to us in all these examples. The
reason that excessive stoutness is laughable is probably because it
calls up an image of the same kind. I almost think that this too is
what sometime makes bashfulness somewhat ridiculous. The bashful man
rather gives the impression of a person embarrassed by his body,
looking round for some convenient cloak-room in which to deposit it.
This is just why the tragic poet is so careful to avoid anything
calculated to attract attention to the material side of his heroes. No
sooner does anxiety about the body manifest itself than the intrusion
of a comic element is to be feared. On this account, the hero in a
tragedy does not eat or drink or warm himself. He does not even sit
down any more than can be helped. To sit down in the middle of a fine
speech would imply that you remembered you had a body. Napoleon, who
was a psychologist when he wished to be so, had noticed that the
transition from tragedy to comedy is effected simply by sitting down.
In the "Journal inedit" of Baron Gourgaud--when speaking of an
interview with the Queen of Prussia after the battle of Iena--he
expresses himself in the following terms: "She received me in tragic
fashion like Chimene: Justice! Sire, Justice! Magdeburg! Thus she
continued in a way most embarrassing to me. Finally, to make her change
her style, I requested her to take a seat. This is the best method for
cutting short a tragic scene, for as soon as you are seated it all
becomes comedy."
Let us now give a wider scope to this image of THE BODY TAKING
PRECEDENCE OF THE SOUL. We shall obtain something more general--THE
MANNER SEEKING TO OUTDO THE MATTER, THE LETTER AIMING AT OUSTING THE
SPIRIT. Is it not perchance this idea that comedy is trying to suggest
to us when holding up a profession to ridicule? It makes the lawyer,
the magistrate and the doctor speak as though health and justice were
of little moment,--the main point being that we should have lawyers,
magistrates and doctors, and that all outward formalities pertaining to
these professions should be scrupulously respected. And so we find the
means substituted for the end, the manner for the matter; no longer is
it the profession that is made for the public, but rather the public
for the profession. Constant attention to form and the mechanical
application of rules here bring about a kind of professional automatism
analogous to that imposed upon the soul by the habits of the body, and
equally laughable. Numerous are the examples of this on the stage.
Without entering into details of the variations executed on this theme,
let us quote two or three passages in which the theme itself is set
forth in all its simplicity. "You are only bound to treat people
according to form," says Doctor Diafoirus in the "Malade imaginaire".
Again, says Doctor Bahis, in "L'Amour medecin": "It is better to die
through following the rules than to recover through violating them." In
the same play, Desfonandres had previously said: "We must always
observe the formalities of professional etiquette, whatever may
happen." And the reason is given by Tomes, his colleague: "A dead man
is but a dead man, but the non-observance of a formality causes a
notable prejudice to the whole faculty." Brid'oison's words, though.
embodying a rather different idea, are none the less significant:
"F-form, mind you, f-form. A man laughs at a judge in a morning coat,
and yet he would quake with dread at the mere sight of an attorney in
his gown. F-form, all a matter of f-form."
Here we have the first illustration of a law which will appear with
increasing distinctness as we proceed with our task. When a musician
strikes a note on an instrument, other notes start up of themselves,
not so loud as the first, yet connected with it by certain definite
relations, which coalesce with it and determine its quality. These are
what are called in physics the overtones of the fundamental note. It
would seem that comic fancy, even in its most far-fetched inventions,
obeys a similar law. For instance, consider this comic note: appearance
seeking to triumph over reality. If our analysis is correct, this note
must have as its overtones the body tantalising the mind, the body
taking precedence of the mind. No sooner, then, does the comic poet
strike the first note than he will add the second on to it,
involuntarily and instinctively. In other words, HE WILL DUPLICATE WHAT
IS RIDICULOUS PROFESSIONALLY WITH SOMETHING THAT IS RIDICULOUS
PHYSICALLY.
When Brid'oison the judge comes stammering on to the stage, is he not
actually preparing us, by this very stammering, to understand the
phenomenon of intellectual ossification we are about to witness? What
bond of secret relationship can there be between the physical defect
and the moral infirmity? It is difficult to say; yet we feel that the
relationship is there, though we cannot express it in words. Perhaps
the situation required that this judging machine should also appear
before us as a talking machine. However it may be, no other overtone
could more perfectly have completed the fundamental note.
When Moliere introduces to us the two ridiculous doctors, Bahis and
Macroton, in L'Amour medecin, he makes one of them speak very slowly,
as though scanning his words syllable by syllable, whilst the other
stutters. We find the same contrast between the two lawyers in Monsieur
de Pourceaugnac. In the rhythm of speech is generally to be found the
physical peculiarity that is destined to complete the element of
professional ridicule. When the author has failed to suggest a defect
of this kind, it is seldom the case that the actor does not
instinctively invent one.
Consequently, there is a natural relationship, which we equally
naturally recognise, between the two images we have been comparing with
each other, the mind crystallising in certain grooves, and the body
losing its elasticity through the influence of certain defects. Whether
or not our attention be diverted from the matter to the manner, or from
the moral to the physical, in both cases the same sort of impression is
conveyed to our imagination; in both, then, the comic is of the same
kind. Here, once more, it has been our aim to follow the natural trend
of the movement of the imagination. This trend or direction, it may be
remembered, was the second of those offered to us, starting from a
central image. A third and final path remains unexplored, along which
we will now proceed.
3. Let us then return, for the last time, to our central image:
something mechanical encrusted on something living. Here, the living
being under discussion was a human being, a person. A mechanical
arrangement, on the other hand, is a thing. What, therefore, incited
laughter was the momentary transformation of a person into a thing, if
one considers the image from this standpoint. Let us then pass from the
exact idea of a machine to the vaguer one of a thing in general. We
shall have a fresh series of laughable images which will be obtained by
taking a blurred impression, so to speak, of the outlines of the former
and will bring us to this new law: WE LAUGH EVERY TIME A PERSON GIVES
US THE IMPRESSION OF BEING A THING.
We laugh at Sancho Panza tumbled into a bed-quilt and tossed into the
air like a football. We laugh at Baron Munchausen turned into a
cannon-ball and travelling through space. But certain tricks of circus
clowns might afford a still more precise exemplification of the same
law. True, we should have to eliminate the jokes, mere interpolations
by the clown into his main theme, and keep in mind only the theme
itself, that is to say, the divers attitudes, capers and movements
which form the strictly "clownish" element in the clown's art. On two
occasions only have I been able to observe this style of the comic in
its unadulterated state, and in both I received the same impression.
The first time, the clowns came and went, collided, fell and jumped up
again in a uniformly accelerated rhythm, visibly intent upon affecting
a CRESCENDO. And it was more and more to the jumping up again, the
REBOUND, that the attention of the public was attracted. Gradually, one
lost sight of the fact that they were men of flesh and blood like
ourselves; one began to think of bundles of all sorts, falling and
knocking against each other. Then the vision assumed a more definite
aspect. The forms grew rounder, the bodies rolled together and seemed
to pick themselves up like balls. Then at last appeared the image
towards which the whole of this scene had doubtless been unconsciously
evolving--large rubber balls hurled against one another in every
direction. The second scene, though even coarser than the first, was no
less instructive. There came on the stage two men, each with an
enormous head, bald as a billiard ball. In their hands they carried
large sticks which each, in turn, brought down on to the other's
cranium. Here, again, a certain gradation was observable. After each
blow, the bodies seemed to grow heavier and more unyielding,
overpowered by an increasing degree of rigidity. Then came the return
blow, in each case heavier and more resounding than the last, coming,
too, after a longer interval. The skulls gave forth a formidable ring
throughout the silent house. At last the two bodies, each quite rigid
and as straight as an arrow, slowly bent over towards each other, the
sticks came crashing down for the last time on to the two heads with a
thud as of enormous mallets falling upon oaken beams, and the pair lay
prone upon the ground. At that instant appeared in all its vividness
the suggestion that the two artists had gradually driven into the
imagination of the spectators: "We are about to become ...we have now
become solid wooden dummies."
A kind of dim, vague instinct may enable even an uncultured mind to get
an inkling here of the subtler results of psychological science. We
know that it is possible to call up hallucinatory visions in a
hypnotised subject by simple suggestion. If he be told that a bird is
perched on his hand, he will see the bird and watch it fly away. The
idea suggested, however, is far from being always accepted with like
docility. Not infrequently, the mesmeriser only succeeds in getting an
idea into his subject's head by slow degrees through a carefully
graduated series of hints. He will then start with objects really
perceived by the subject, and will endeavour to make the perception of
these objects more and more indefinite; then, step by step, he will
bring out of this state of mental chaos the precise form of the object
of which he wishes to create an hallucination. Something of the kind
happens to many people when dropping off to sleep; they see those
coloured, fluid, shapeless masses, which occupy the field of vision,
insensibly solidifying into distinct objects.
Consequently, the gradual passing from the dim and vague to the clear
and distinct is the method of suggestion par excellence. I fancy it
might be found to be at the root of a good many comic suggestions,
especially in the coarser forms of the comic, in which the
transformation of a person into a thing seems to be taking place before
our eyes. But there are other and more subtle methods in use, among
poets, for instance, which perhaps unconsciously lead to the same end.
By a certain arrangement of rhythm, rhyme and assonance, it is possible
to lull the imagination, to rock it to and fro between like and like
with a regular see-saw motion, and thus prepare it submissively to
accept the vision suggested. Listen to these few lines of Regnard, and
see whether something like the fleeting image of a DOLL does not cross
the field of your imagination:
... Plus, il doit a maints particuliers La somme de dix mil une livre
une obole, Pour l'avoir sans relache un an sur sa parole Habille,
voiture, chauffe, chausse, gante, Alimente, rase, desaltere, porte.
[Footnote: Further, he owes to many an honest wight Item-the sum two
thousand pounds, one farthing, For having on his simple word of honour
Sans intermission for an entire year Clothed him, conveyed him, warmed
him, shod him, gloved him, Fed him and shaved him, quenched his thirst
and borne him.]
Is not something of the same kind found in the following sally of
Figaro's (though here an attempt is perhaps made to suggest the image
of an animal rather than that of a thing): "Quel homme est-ce?--C'est
un beau, gros, court, jeune vieillard, gris pommele, ruse, rase, blase,
qui guette et furette, et gronde et geint tout a la fois." [Footnote:
"What sort of man is here?--He is a handsome, stout, short, youthful
old gentleman, iron-grey, an artful knave, clean shaved, clean 'used
up,' who spies and pries and growls and groans all in the same breath."]
Now, between these coarse scenes and these subtle suggestions there is
room for a countless number of amusing effects, for all those that can
be obtained by talking about persons as one would do about mere things.
We will only select one or two instances from the plays of Labiche, in
which they are legion.
Just as M. Perrichon is getting into the railway carriage, he makes
certain of not forgetting any of his parcels: "Four, five, six, my wife
seven, my daughter eight, and myself nine." In another play, a fond
father is boasting of his daughter's learning in the following terms:
"She will tell you, without faltering, all the kings of France that
have occurred." This phrase, "that have occurred," though not exactly
transforming the kings into mere things, likens them, all the same, to
events of an impersonal nature.
As regards this latter example, note that it is unnecessary to complete
the identification of the person with the thing in order to ensure a
comic effect. It is sufficient for us to start in this direction by
feigning, for instance, to confuse the person with the function he
exercises. I will only quote a sentence spoken by a village mayor in
one of About's novels: "The prefect, who has always shown us the same
kindness, though he has been changed several times since 1847..."
All these witticisms are constructed on the same model. We might make
up any number of them, when once we are in possession of the recipe.
But the art of the story-teller or the playwright does not merely
consist in concocting jokes. The difficulty lies in giving to a joke
its power of suggestion, i.e. in making it acceptable. And we only do
accept it either because it seems to be the natural product of a
particular state of mind or because it is in keeping with the
circumstances of the case. For instance, we are aware that M. Perrichon
is greatly excited on the occasion of his first railway journey. The
expression "to occur" is one that must have cropped up a good many
times in the lessons repeated by the girl before her father; it makes
us think of such a repetition. Lastly, admiration of the governmental
machine might, at a pinch, be extended to the point of making us
believe that no change takes place in the prefect when he changes his
name, and that the function gets carried on independently of the
functionary.
We have now reached a point very far from the original cause of
laughter. Many a comic form, that cannot be explained by itself, can
indeed only be understood from its resemblance to another, which only
makes us laugh by reason of its relationship with a third, and so on
indefinitely, so that psychological analysis, however luminous and
searching, will go astray unless it holds the thread along which the
comic impression has travelled from one end of the series to the other.
Where does this progressive continuity come from? What can be the
driving force, the strange impulse which causes the comic to glide thus
from image to image, farther and farther away from the starting-point,
until it is broken up and lost in infinitely remote analogies? But what
is that force which divides and subdivides the branches of a tree into
smaller boughs and its roots into radicles? An inexorable law dooms
every living energy, during the brief interval allotted to it in time,
to cover the widest possible extent in space. Now, comic fancy is
indeed a living energy, a strange plant that has nourished on the stony
portions of the social soil, until such time as culture should allow it
to vie with the most refined products of art. True, we are far from
great art in the examples of the comic we have just been reviewing. But
we shall draw nearer to it, though without attaining to it completely,
in the following chapter. Below art, we find artifice, and it is this
zone of artifice, midway between nature and art, that we are now about
to enter. We are going to deal with the comic playwright and the wit.