been looked upon as a mere curiosity in which
the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange, isolated
phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human activity. Hence
those definitions which tend to make the comic into an abstract
relation between ideas: "an intellectual contrast," "a palpable
absurdity," etc.,--definitions which, even were they really suitable to
every form of the comic, would not in the least explain why the comic
makes us laugh. How, indeed, should it come about that this particular
logical relation, as soon as it is perceived, contracts, expands and
shakes our limbs, whilst all other relations leave the body unaffected?
It is not from this point of view that we shall approach the problem.
To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural
environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the
utility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say at
once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must
answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL
signification.
Let us clearly mark the point towards which our three preliminary
observations are converging. The comic will come into being, it
appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of
their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play
nothing but their intelligence. What, now, is the particular point on
which their attention will have to be concentrated, and what will here
be the function of intelligence? To reply to these questions will be at
once to come to closer grips with the problem. But here a few examples
have become indispensable.
II
A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by
burst out laughing. They would not laugh at him, I imagine, could they
suppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on the
ground. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary.
Consequently, it is not his sudden change of attitude that raises a
laugh, but rather the involuntary element in this change,--his
clumsiness, in fact. Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He should
have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle. Instead of that, through
lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physical
obstinacy, AS A RESULT, IN FACT, OF RIGIDITY OR OF MOMENTUM, the
muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances
of the case called for something el
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