imself as a
wit when he pleases. To do this there will be no need for him to
acquire anything; it seems rather as though he would have to give up
something. He would simply have to let his ideas hold converse with one
another "for nothing, for the mere joy of the thing!" [Footnote: "Pour
rien, pour le plaisir" is a quotation from Victor Hugo's Marion
Delorme] He would only have to unfasten the double bond which keeps his
ideas in touch with his feelings and his soul in touch with life. In
short, he would turn into a wit by simply resolving to be no longer a
poet in feeling, but only in intelligence.

But if wit consists, for the most part, in seeing things SUB SPECIE
THEATRI, it is evidently capable of being specially directed to one
variety of dramatic art, namely, comedy. Here we have a more restricted
meaning of the term, and, moreover, the only one that interests us from
the point of view of the theory of laughter. What is here called WIT is
a gift for dashing off comic scenes in a few strokes--dashing them off,
however, so subtly, delicately and rapidly, that all is over as soon as
we begin to notice them.

Who are the actors in these scenes? With whom has the wit to deal?
First of all, with his interlocutors themselves, when his witticism is
a direct retort to one of them. Often with an absent person whom he
supposes to have spoken and to whom he is replying. Still oftener, with
the whole world,--in the ordinary meaning of the term,--which he takes
to task, twisting a current idea into a paradox, or making use of a
hackneyed phrase, or parodying some quotation or proverb. If we compare
these scenes in miniature with one another, we find they are almost
always variations of a comic theme with which we are well acquainted,
that of the "robber robbed." You take up a metaphor, a phrase, an
argument, and turn it against the man who is, or might be, its author,
so that he is made to say what he did not mean to say and lets himself
be caught, to some extent, in the toils of language. But the theme of
the "robber robbed" is not the only possible one. We have gone over
many varieties of the comic, and there is not one of them that is
incapable of being volatilised into a witticism.

Every witty remark, then, lends itself to an analysis, whose chemical
formula, so to say, we are now in a position to state. It runs as
follows: Take the remark, first enlarge it into a regular scene, then
find out the category of the comic