ckens--but the writers of comic paragraphs for
to-morrow's newspaper, all regard our human incongruities with a sort
of affection. The comic spirit is essentially a social spirit. The
great figures of tragedy are solitary. The immortal figures of comedy
belong to a social group.

No recent discussion of humor is more illuminating and more directly
applicable to the conditions of American life than that of the
contemporary French philosopher Bergson. Bergson insists throughout
his brilliant little book on _Laughter_ that laughter is a social
function. Life demands elasticity. Hence whatever is stiff, automatic,
machine-like, excites a smile. We laugh when a person gives us the
impression of being a thing,--a sort of mechanical toy. Every
inadaptation of the individual to society is potentially comic. Thus
laughter becomes a social initiation. It is a kind of hazing which we
visit upon one another. But we do not isolate the comic personage as we
do the solitary, tragic figure. The comic personage is usually a type;
he is one of an absurd group; he is a miser, a pedant, a pretentious
person, a doctor or a lawyer in whom the professional traits have
become automatic so that he thinks more of his professional behavior
than he does of human health and human justice. Of all these separatist
tendencies, laughter is the great corrective. When the individual
becomes set in his ways, obstinate, preoccupied, automatic, the rest of
us laugh him out of it if we can. Of course all that we are thinking
about at the moment is his ridiculousness. But nevertheless, by
laughing we become the saviors of society.

No one, I think, can help observing that this conception of humor as
incongruity is particularly applicable to a new country. On the new
soil and under the new sky, in new social groupings, all the
fundamental contrasts and absurdities of our human society assume a new
value. We see them under a fresh light. They are differently focussed.
The broad humors of the camp, its swift and picturesque play of light
and shade, its farce and caricature no less than its atmosphere of
comradeship, of sentiment, and of daring, are all transferred to the
humor of the newly settled country. The very word "humor" once meant
singularity of character, "some extravagant habit, passion, or
affection," says Dryden, "particular to some one person." Every newly
opened country encourages, for a while, this oddness and incongruity of
individual character