likewise, "The laughable is the deformed or ugly
thing which is not pushed to the point where it is painful or injurious.
An occasion for laughter is the degradation of a person of dignity in
circumstances which do not arouse a strong emotion," like indignation,
anger, or pity. Descartes puts still more limits upon laughter. Speaking
of malice he says that laughter cannot be provoked except by misfortunes
not only _light_ but also _unforseen_ and _deserved_. "Derision or
mockery," he says, "is a kind of joy mixed with hate, which comes from
one's perceiving some _little misfortune_ in a person _whom one thinks
deserves it_. We hate this misfortune but are happy at seeing it in some
one who merits it, and, _when this happens unexpectedly, surprise causes
us to burst out laughing_. But this misfortune must be small, for if it
is great we cannot believe that he who meets it deserves it, unless one
has a very malicious or hateful nature."

This fact can be established directly by analyzing the most cruel
laughter. If we enter into the feelings of the one who laughs and set
aside the disagreeable sentiments, irritation, anger, and disgust, which
at times they produce upon us, we come to understand even the savage
sneer which appears to us as an insult to suffering; the laugh of the
savage, trampling his conquered enemy under foot, or that of the child
torturing unfortunate animals. This laugh is, in fact, inoffensive in
its way, it is cruel in fact but not in intention. What it expresses is
not a perverse, satanic joy but a _heartlessness_, as is so properly
said. In the child and the savage sympathy has not been born, that is to
say, the absence of imagination for the sufferings of others is
complete. As a result we have a negative cruelty, a sort of altruistic
or social anaesthesia.

When such an anaesthesia is not complete, when the altruistic
sensibility of one who laughs is only dull, his egotism being very keen,
his laughter might appear still less hatefully cruel. It would express
then not properly the joy of seeing others suffer but that of not having
to undergo their suffering and the power of seeing it only as a
spectacle.

Analogous facts may be cited closer to us, easier to verify. Those who
enjoy robust health often laugh at invalids: their imagination does not
comprehend physical suffering, they are incapable of sympathizing with
those who experience it. Likewise those who possess calm and even
dispositions