Laughter | Page 7

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