mpleted the fundamental note.

When Moliere introduces to us the two ridiculous doctors, Bahis and
Macroton, in L'Amour medecin, he makes one of them speak very slowly,
as though scanning his words syllable by syllable, whilst the other
stutters. We find the same contrast between the two lawyers in Monsieur
de Pourceaugnac. In the rhythm of speech is generally to be found the
physical peculiarity that is destined to complete the element of
professional ridicule. When the author has failed to suggest a defect
of this kind, it is seldom the case that the actor does not
instinctively invent one.

Consequently, there is a natural relationship, which we equally
naturally recognise, between the two images we have been comparing with
each other, the mind crystallising in certain grooves, and the body
losing its elasticity through the influence of certain defects. Whether
or not our attention be diverted from the matter to the manner, or from
the moral to the physical, in both cases the same sort of impression is
conveyed to our imagination; in both, then, the comic is of the same
kind. Here, once more, it has been our aim to follow the natural trend
of the movement of the imagination. This trend or direction, it may be
remembered, was the second of those offered to us, starting from a
central image. A third and final path remains unexplored, along which
we will now proceed.

3. Let us then return, for the last time, to our central image:
something mechanical encrusted on something living. Here, the living
being under discussion was a human being, a person. A mechanical
arrangement, on the other hand, is a thing. What, therefore, incited
laughter was the momentary transformation of a person into a thing, if
one considers the image from this standpoint. Let us then pass from the
exact idea of a machine to the vaguer one of a thing in general. We
shall have a fresh series of laughable images which will be obtained by
taking a blurred impression, so to speak, of the outlines of the former
and will bring us to this new law: WE LAUGH EVERY TIME A PERSON GIVES
US THE IMPRESSION OF BEING A THING.

We laugh at Sancho Panza tumbled into a bed-quilt and tossed into the
air like a football. We laugh at Baron Munchausen turned into a
cannon-ball and travelling through space. But certain tricks of circus
clowns might afford a still more precise exemplification of the same
law. True, we should have to eliminate the jokes, mere interpolat