ar as it
forgets itself, for were it always on the alert, it would be
ever-changing continuity, irrevertible progress, undivided unity. And
so the ludicrous in events may be defined as absentmindedness in
things, just as the ludicrous in an individual character always results
from some fundamental absentmindedness in the person, as we have
already intimated and shall prove later on. This absentmindedness in
events, however, is exceptional. Its results are slight. At any rate it
is incurable, so that it is useless to laugh at it. Therefore the idea
would never have occurred to any one of exaggerating that
absentmindedness, of converting it into a system and creating an art
for it, if laughter were not always a pleasure and mankind did not
pounce upon the slightest excuse for indulging in it. This is the real
explanation of light comedy, which holds the same relation to actual
life as does a jointed dancing-doll to a man walking,--being, as it is,
an artificial exaggeration of a natural rigidity in things. The thread
that binds it to actual life is a very fragile one. It is scarcely more
than a game which, like all games, depends on a previously accepted
convention. Comedy in character strikes far deeper roots into life.
With that kind of comedy we shall deal more particularly in the final
portion of our investigation. But we must first analyse a certain type
of the comic, in many respects similar to that of light comedy: the
comic in words.

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 sentence or to the choice of
the words. It does not set forth, by means of language, special cases
of absentmindedness in man or in events. It lays stress on lapses of
attention in language itself. In this case, it is language itself that
becomes comic.

Comic sayings, however, are not a matter of spontaneous generatio