NTENCES, as we shall show by a few
examples.

Let it first be said that these three laws are far from being of equal
importance as regards the theory of the ludicrous. INVERSION is the
least interesting of the three. It must be easy of application,
however, for it is noticeable that, no sooner do professional wits hear
a sentence spoken than they experiment to see if a meaning cannot be
obtained by reversing it,--by putting, for instance, the subject in
place of the object, and the object in place of the subject. It is not
unusual for this device to be employed for refuting an idea in more or
less humorous terms. One of the characters in a comedy of Labiche
shouts out to his neighbour on the floor above, who is in the habit of
dirtying his balcony, "What do you mean by emptying your pipe on to my
terrace?" The neighbour retorts, "What do you mean by putting your
terrace under my pipe?" There is no necessity to dwell upon this kind
of wit, instances of which could easily be multiplied. The RECIPROCAL
INTERFERENCE of two sets of ideas in the same sentence is an
inexhaustible source of amusing varieties. There are many ways of
bringing about this interference, I mean of bracketing in the same
expression two independent meanings that apparently tally. The least
reputable of these ways is the pun. In the pun, the same sentence
appears to offer two independent meanings, but it is only an
appearance; in reality there are two different sentences made up of
different words, but claiming to be one and the same because both have
the same sound. We pass from the pun, by imperceptible stages, to the
true play upon words. Here there is really one and the same sentence
through which two different sets of ideas are expressed, and we are
confronted with only one series of words; but advantage is taken of the
different meanings a word may have, especially when used figuratively
instead of literally. So that in fact there is often only a slight
difference between the play upon words on the one hand, and a poetic
metaphor or an illuminating comparison on the other. Whereas an
illuminating comparison and a striking image always seem to reveal the
close harmony that exists between language and nature, regarded as two
parallel forms of life, the play upon words makes us think somehow of a
negligence on the part of language, which, for the time being, seems to
have forgotten its real function and now claims to accommodate things
to itself ins