The above may, perhaps, serve as a sufficiently full enumeration of the more prominent of those attributes or aspects of laughable things which, some in some cases, others in others, make direct appeal to our mirth. {114}
That each of these may of itself thus start the currents of laughter will, I believe, be admitted by those who are familiar with the field of human mirth. There is, I hold, ample evidence to show that what is embarrassing, what is contrary to rule, what is demeaning, what is unreal and pretentious, and the rest, do each, under certain limiting conditions, move men’s laughter.
It is, no doubt, difficult to supply a perfect demonstration of the fact of the intrinsic laughableness of each of these features. It has already been pointed out that in many of the most agreeable instances of the laughable different stimuli combine their forces. This is so much the case that it is sometimes difficult to decide which of the co-operating attributes is the most prominent. For example, the spectacle of the lackey donning the externals of a fine gentleman—a favourite subject of mirthful treatment by Molière and others—may amuse us as a transparent pretence, as a fine display of insolent vanity, or, again, as an amusing caricature of the extravagant absurdities of fine manners. Extravagance in dress and the like is frequently found in the company of a deliciously erroneous idea of one’s own importance. Intellectual naïveté may peep out at us and a moral naïveté look over its shoulder, as in the remark of a lady whom the astronomer Cassini had invited to see an eclipse, when she found that she had arrived too late: “M. de Cassini will be good enough to begin again for my sake”.[64] As I have remarked, the unfitting is in a large number of cases an introduction of something unworthy; as when a man at a dinner-party almost suggests something of an animal violence in his mode of eating, or an orator resorts to a “wooden” manner of speech or gesture, or when an unhappy simile hurls {115} the hearer into the lowest region of the commonplace, a proceeding satirised in the well-known lines from Butler’s Hudibras:—
And like a lobster boil’d, the morn
From black to red began to turn.
As a last example of the many-sidedness of the laughable we may name affectation, particularly when it takes the form of aping another’s manners; for this may amuse us as a bit of acting seen through, or as an incongruous intrusion of a foreign element into the natural character of the imitator, or, again, as a weakness, a lack of intellectual or of moral initiative.
Nevertheless, the appearance of cross-division in our scheme is really no objection to it. By collecting a sufficient number of instances, and noting how the presentation of a certain feature affects us when it is plainly the preponderant stimulus, and how it will continue to affect us in much the same way when its concomitants vary, we may satisfy ourselves that each of the aspects here named is effective as a provocative of laughter. It will be for experimental psychology, if ever its methods are competent to grapple with the subject, to make this clearer.
There is another objection, which, though related to the last, is to be carefully distinguished from it. Even in cases where the laughable feature is clearly localised there may seem something arbitrary in our mode of describing it. For example, it may be said, why distinguish the relation of the unfit and kindred relations as a special group, since in all cases they may be regarded as products and expressions of a defective intelligence or taste? To raise this difficulty now is, however, to anticipate our theoretical problem, how far these several varieties of laughable feature lend themselves to reduction to a {116} common principle. In naming each of the above groups I have sought to envisage the laughable aspect as the natural man, innocent of theoretic aims, would envisage it.
What is important here is to emphasise both the frequent combination of entertaining features in the objects which excite our laughter, and the fact that one and the same feature may be envisaged in more than one way. These two circumstances throw an interesting light on the meaning of the long discussions and the want of agreement among theorists.
In drawing up this list of the laughable features in things I have said nothing about the connection between this part of the inquiry and that which preceded it. Yet the connection has not been wholly hidden. In the entertaining effect of new things we have found an element of the laughter which springs from a sudden expansion of joy. In the laughter excited by the indecent we have noted a trace of the laughter of “sudden glory” and of what I have called nervous laughter. Lastly, in dealing with the entertaining quality of the more sportive wit we seem to have got near the laughter of play.