ith the joy of
spreading it. Very often it happens that many good humorists are
temperamentally far from gay, and laugh at their jokes only on the
rebound, echoing the laughter which they provoke. To laugh, then, is to
share the gaiety of others, whether this gaiety is communicated from
them to us or from us to them. It seems that we can be moved to laughter
only by the merriment of others, that we possess ours only indirectly
when others send it to us. Human solidarity never appears more clearly
than in the case of laughter.

Yet can one say that sympathy actually produces laughter? Is it not
enough to say that it increases it, that it strengthens its effects? All
our sentiments are without doubt in a sense revealed to us by others.
How many, as Rochefoucauld says, would be ignorant of love if they had
never read novels! How many in the same way would never have discovered
by themselves the laughable side of people and things. Yet even the
feelings which one experiences by contagion one can experience only of
one's own accord, in one's own way, and according to one's disposition.
This fact alone of their contagion proves that from one's birth one
carries the germ in himself. Sympathy would explain, then, contagion,
but not the birth, of laughter. The fact is that our feelings exist for
ourselves only when they acquire a communicative or social value; they
have to be diffused in order to manifest themselves. Sympathy does not
create them but it gives them their place in the world. It gives them
just that access of intensity without which their nature cannot develop
or even appear: thus it is that our laughter would be for us as if it
did not exist, if it did not find outside itself an echo which increases
it.

From the fact that sympathy is the law of laughter, does it follow that
it is the cause? Not at all. It would be even contradictory to maintain
this. A laugh being given, others are born out of sympathy. But the
first laugh or one originally given, where does it get its origin?
Communicated laughter implies spontaneous laughter as the echo implies a
sound. If sympathy explains one, it is, it would seem, an antipathy or
the absence of sympathy which produces the other. "The thing at which we
laugh," says Aristotle, "is a defect or ugliness which is not great
enough to cause suffering or injury. Thus, for example, a ridiculous
face is an ugly or misshapen face, but one on which suffering has not
marked." Bain says