. A complete investigation into the illusions of vanity, and into
the ridicule that clings to them, would cast a strange light upon the
whole theory of laughter. We should find laughter performing, with
mathematical regularity, one of its main functions--that of bringing
back to complete self-consciousness a certain self-admiration which is
almost automatic, and thus obtaining the greatest possible sociability
of characters. We should see that vanity, though it is a natural
product of social life, is an inconvenience to society, just as certain
slight poisons, continually secreted by the human organism, would
destroy it in the long run, if they were not neutralised by other
secretions. Laughter is unceasingly doing work of this kind. In this
respect, it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is
laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughable is
vanity.

While dealing with the comic in form and movement, we showed how any
simple image, laughable in itself, is capable of worming its way into
other images of a more complex nature and instilling into them
something of its comic essence; thus, the highest forms of the comic
can sometimes be explained by the lowest. The inverse process, however,
is perhaps even more common, and many coarse comic effects are the
direct result of a drop from some very subtle comic element. For
instance, vanity, that higher form of the comic, is an element we are
prone to look for, minutely though unconsciously, in every
manifestation of human activity. We look for it if only to laugh at it.
Indeed, our imagination often locates it where it has no business to
be. Perhaps we must attribute to this source the altogether coarse
comic element in certain effects which psychologists have very
inadequately explained by contrast: a short man bowing his head to pass
beneath a large door; two individuals, one very tall the other a mere
dwarf, gravely walking along arm-in-arm, etc. By scanning narrowly this
latter image, we shall probably find that the shorter of the two
persons seems as though he were trying TO RAISE HIMSELF to the height
of the taller, like the frog that wanted to make itself as large as the
ox.

III

It would be quite impossible to go through all the peculiarities of
character that either coalesce or compete with vanity in order to force
themselves upon the attention of the comic poet. We have shown that all
failings may become laughable, and even, occa