collections, try to discover, in the
games that amused us as children, the first faint traces of the
combinations that make us laugh as grown-up persons. We are too apt to
speak of our feelings of pleasure and of pain as though full grown at
birth, as though each one of them had not a history of its own. Above
all, we are too apt to ignore the childish element, so to speak, latent
in most of our joyful emotions. And yet, how many of our present
pleasures, were we to examine them closely, would shrink into nothing
more than memories of past ones! What would there be left of many of
our emotions were we to reduce them to the exact quantum of pure
feeling they contain, by subtracting from them all that is merely
reminiscence? Indeed, it seems possible that, after a certain age, we
become impervious to all fresh or novel forms of joy, and the sweetest
pleasures of the middle-aged man are perhaps nothing more than a
revival of the sensations of childhood, a balmy zephyr wafted in
fainter and fainter breaths by a past that is ever receding. In any
case, whatever reply we give to this broad question, one thing is
certain: there can be no break in continuity between the child's
delight in games and that of the grown-up person. Now, comedy is a
game, a game that imitates life. And since, in the games of the child
when working its dolls and puppets, many of the movements are produced
by strings, ought we not to find those same strings, somewhat frayed by
wear, reappearing as the threads that knot together the situations in a
comedy? Let us, then, start with the games of a child, and follow the
imperceptible process by which, as he grows himself, he makes his
puppets grow, inspires them with life, and finally brings them to an
ambiguous state in which, without ceasing to be puppets, they have yet
become human beings. We thus obtain characters of a comedy type. And
upon them we can test the truth of the law of which all our preceding
analyses gave an inkling, a law in accordance with which we will define
all broadly comic situations in general. ANY ARRANGEMENT OF ACTS AND
EVENTS IS COMIC WHICH GIVES US, IN A SINGLE COMBINATION, THE ILLUSION
OF LIFE AND THE DISTINCT IMPRESSION OF A MECHANICAL ARRANGEMENT.

1. THE JACK-IN-THE-BOX.--As children we have all played with the little
man who springs out of his box. You squeeze him flat, he jumps up
again. Push him lower, and he shoots up still higher. Crush him down
beneath the lid, and of