Quotations from Chapter 2

"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend"

The Comic Element in Situations and the Comic Element in Words


We have studied the comic element in forms, in attitudes, and in movements generally; now let us for it in actions and in situations.


..comedy is a game, a game that imitates life.


Any arrangement of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement.


1. The Jack-in-the-Box ...Why is there something comic in the repetition of a word on the stage? ..It makes us laugh only because it symbolises a special play of moral elements, this play itself being the symbol of an altogether material diversion. It is the diversion of the cat with the mouse, the diversion of the child pushing back the Jack-in-the-box, time after time, to the bottom of his box, - but in a refined and spiritualised form, transferred to the realm of feelings and ideas. Let us then state the law which, we think, defines the main comic varieties of word-repetition on the stage: In a comic repetition of words we generally find two terms: A repressed feeling which goes off like a spring, and an idea that delights in repressing the feeling anew....Valere points out to Harpagon the wrong he would doing in forcing his daughter to marry a man she does not love. "No dowry wanted!" interrupts the miserly Harpagon every few moments. behind this exclamation, which recurs automatically, we faintly discern a complete repeating-machine set going by a fixed idea.


For a man to make a resolution never henceforth to say what he does not think, even though he 'openly defy the whole human race', is not necessarily laughable; it is only a phase of life at its highest and best. For another man, through amiability, selfishness, or disdain, to prefer to flatter people is only another phase of life; there is nothing in it to make us laugh. You may even combine these two men into one, and arrange that the individual waver between offensive frankness and delusive politeness, this duel between two opposing feelings will not even then be comic, rather it will appear the essence of seriousness if these two feelings through their very distinctness compete with each other, develop side by side, and make up between them a composite mental condition, adopting in short, a modus vivendi which merely gives us the complex impression of life. But imagine these two feelings as inelastic and unvarying elements in a really living man, make him oscillate from one to the other; above all, arrange that this oscillation becomes entirely mechanical by adopting the well-known form of some habitual, simple, childish contrivance: then you will get the image we have so far found in all laughable objects, something mechanical in something living; in fact, something comic.




2 The Dancing-Jack


All that is serious in life comes from our freedom. The feelings we have matured, the passions we have brooded over, the actions we have weighed, decided upon, and carried through, in short, all that comes from us and is our very own, these are the things that give life its oft-times dramatic and generally grave aspect. What, then, is requisite to transform all this into comedy? Merely to fancy that our seeming freedom conceals the strings of a dancing-Jack, and that we are, as the poet says, 'humble marionettes The wires of which are pulled by fate.' ..there is not a real, a serious, or even a dramatic scene that fancy cannot render comic by simply calling forth this image.




3. The Snow-Ball


Take..the rolling snow-ball, which increases in size as it moves along. We might just as well think of toy soldiers standing behind one another. Push the first and it tumbles down on the second, this latter knocks down the third, and the state of things goes from bad to worse until they all lie prone upon the floor. Or again, take a house of cards that has been built up with infinite care: the first touch...


Now let us open a children's picture book; we shall find this arrangement already on the high road to becoming comic. here, for instance -- picked up by chance -- we have a caller rushing violently into a drawing-room; he knocks against a lady, who upsets her cup of tea over an old gentleman, who slips against a glass window which falls into the street on to the head of a constable, who sets the whole police-force agog, etc.


It is the characteristic of a mechanical combination to be generally reversible. ...in a well-known comedy by Labiche..The curtain rises on an old bachelor and an old maid, acquaintances of long-standing, at the moment of enjoying their daily rubber. Each of them, unknown to the other, has applied to the same matrimonial agency. Through innumerable difficulties, one mishaps following on the heels of another, they hurry along, side by side, right through the play, to the interview which brings them back, purely and simply, into each other's presence...


But why is it we laugh at this mechanical arrangement? The rigid mechanism which we occasionally detect, as a foreign body, in the living continuity of human affairs is of peculiar interest to us as being a kind of absentmindedness on the part of life. Were events unceasingly mindful of their own course, there would be no coincidences, no conjunctures and no circular series; everything would evolve and progress continuously. And were all men always attentive to life, were we constantly keeping in touch with others as well as with ourselves, nothing within us would ever appear as due to the working of strings or springs. the comic is that aspect of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life. Consequently it calls for an individual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and events.


A continual change of aspect, the irreversibility of the order of phenomena, the perfect individuality of of a perfectly self-contained series: such then, are the outward characteristics - whether real or apparent is of little moment - which distinguish 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. Now it is easy to see that these are also the methods of light comedy and that no others are possible.


1. Repetition -Our present problem no longer deals, like the preceding one, with a word or a sentence repeated by an individual, but rather with a situation, that is, a combination pof circumstances, which recurs several times in its original form and thus contrasts with the steam of life.


2. Inversion -..we laugh at the prisoner at the bar lecturing the magistrate; at a child presuming to teach its parents; in a word, at everything that comes under the heading 'topsyturvydom'. Not infrequently comedy sets before us a character who lays a trap in which he is the first to be caught. The plot of the villain who is the victim of his own villainy, or the cheat cheated, forms the stock-in-trade of a good many plays.


3. Reciprocal Inversion of Series - Perhaps it may be defined as follows: 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... You will think at once of an equivocal situation. and the equivocal situation in indeed one which permits of two different meanings at the same time, the one merely plausible, which is put forward by the actors, the other a real one, which is given by the public. 




Whether we find reciprocal interference of series, inversion, or repetition, we see that the objective is always the same - to obtain what we have called a mechanisation of life... all these being processes that consist in looking upon life as a repeating mechanism, with reversible action and interchangeable parts.

II

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


... we should draw an important distinction between the Witty (spirituel) and Comic. A word is said to be comic when it is said to make us laugh at the person who utters it, and witty when it makes us laugh either at a third party or at ourselves. But in most cases we can hardly make up our minds whether the word is comic or witty. All we can say is that it is laughable.

'My eggs lake'

1. Inadvertently to say or do what we have no intention of saying or doing, as a result of inelasticity or momentum, is, as we are aware, one of the main causes of the comic.


2. 'A comic effect is obtained whenever we pretend to take literally an expression which was used figuratively'; or, 'Once our attention is fixed on the material aspect of a metaphor, the idea express becomes comic.'


A: ''He is always running after a joke."
B: "I'll back the joke!"


The most common forms of these contrasts is perhaps that between the real and the ideal, between what is and what ought to be. .. Sometimes we state what ought to be done, and pretend to believe that this is just what is actually being done; then we have irony. Sometimes, on the contrary, we describe with scrupulous minuteness what is being done, and pretend to believe that this is just what ought to be done; such is often the method of humour. Humour is .. the counterpart of irony. Both are forms of satire, but irony is oratorical in its nature, whilst humour partakes of the scientific.


Here..we reach the point at which the peculiarities of language really express peculiarities of character, a closer investigation of which we must hold for the next chapter. Thus,... the comic in words follows closely the comic in situation ad is finally merged, along with the latter, in the comic in character.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”