Laughter : an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

must make a distinction, however, between the comic EXPRESSED and the comic CREATED by language. The former could, if necessary, be translated from one language into another, though at the cost of losing the greater portion of its significance when introduced into a fresh society different in manners, in literature, and above all in association of ideas. But it is generally impossible to translate the latter.

In Moliere's plays, on the contrary, it is the moods of the persons on the stage, not of the audience, that make repetition seem natural.

the living from the merely mechanical. Let us take the counterpart of each of these: we shall obtain three processes which might be called REPETITION, INVERSION, and RECIPROCAL INTERFERENCE OF SERIES.

And such, indeed, seems to be the idea of Herbert Spencer: according to him, laughter is the indication of an effort which suddenly encounters a void.

This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and in events.

Kant had already said something of the kind: "Laughter is the result of an expectation, which, of a sudden, ends in nothing."

The farther we proceed in this investigation into the methods of comedy, the more clearly we see the part played by childhood's memories.

Assuming that the stage is both a magnified and a simplified view of life, we shall find that comedy is capable of furnishing us with more information than real life on this particular part of our subject.

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.

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.