igidity. We formulated this idea at the
outset of this work. We have verified it in its main results, and have
just applied it to the definition of comedy. Now we must get to closer
quarters, and show how it enables us to delimitate the exact position
comedy occupies among all the other arts. In one sense it might be said
that all character is comic, provided we mean by character the
ready-made element in our personality, that mechanical element which
resembles a piece of clockwork wound up once for all and capable of
working automatically. It is, if you will, that which causes us to
imitate ourselves. And it is also, for that very reason, that which
enables others to imitate us. Every comic character is a type.
Inversely, every resemblance to a type has something comic in it.
Though we may long have associated with an individual without
discovering anything about him to laugh at, still, if advantage is t
taken of some accidental analogy to dub him with the name of a famous
hero of romance or drama, he will in our eyes border upon the
ridiculous, if only for a moment. And yet this hero of romance may not
be a comic character at all. But then it is comic to be like him. It is
comic to wander out of one's own self. It is comic to fall into a
ready-made category. And what is most comic of all is to become a
category oneself into which others will fall, as into a ready-made
frame; it is to crystallise into a stock character.

Thus, to depict characters, that is to say, general types, is the
object of high-class comedy. This has often been said. But it is as
well to repeat it, since there could be no better definition of comedy.
Not only are we entitled to say that comedy gives us general types, but
we might add that it is the ONLY one of all the arts that aims at the
general; so that once this objective has been attributed to it, we have
said all that it is and all that the rest cannot be. To prove that such
is really the essence of comedy, and that it is in this respect opposed
to tragedy, drama and the other forms of art, we should begin by
defining art in its higher forms: then, gradually coming down to comic
poetry, we should find that this latter is situated on the border-line
between art and life, and that, by the generality of its
subject-matter, it contrasts with the rest of the arts. We cannot here
plunge into so vast a subject of investigation; but we needs must
sketch its main outlines, lest we overlook what, to