The significance of this invention of his own illustration by Schopenhauer is that he was not a metaphysical recluse, but knew the world and its literatures. Other theorists have not shown the same daring, but have contented themselves with finding their instances. Yet in too many cases the arbitrary way in which illustrations have been selected, while instances making against the theory have been ignored, shows clearly enough that there has been no serious effort to build on a large and firm basis of observation. This may be illustrated not only from the works of Germans, but from those of a people which has claimed, and with justice, to be the laughing nation par excellence. In a recent volume, marked by great ingenuity, M. Henri Bergson,[4] an accomplished thinker, attempts to reduce all forms of the ludicrous to a substitution in our movements, speech and action, of the rigidity (raideur) of a machine for the pliancy and variability of an organism. The writer has no difficulty in finding examples of the stiff mechanical effects which amuse us, say, in gestures and carriage. But the astonishing thing is that he never refers to the complementary group of facts, the instances of excessive spontaneity and {8} freedom of movement where a certain repression and mechanical uniformity are looked for. The exuberant childish boundings of the clown, an excess of emphasis or gesture in social intercourse, these and the like are surely just as comical as the want of the signs of a full play of life may be in other circumstances.
Perhaps an even worse offence than ignoring facts is trying to twist them into a shape that will fit an adopted theory. This occurs, too, and frequently, among writers on our subject. Here is an example among recent theorists. According to a French essayist, when we laugh at a clown pushing hard against an open door, we do not laugh merely at the absurd disproportion between the task to be accomplished and the amount of effort put into it. We only laugh when our minds pass to a second and reflective stage, and recognise that the man does not perceive the door to be open, when, consequently, we are able to view the disproportionate and quite needless exertion as natural.[5] A more striking instance of inability to understand the swift movement of common men’s laughter it would be difficult to find. As we shall see, theories of laughter, like theories of Shakespeare’s genius, have frequently come to grief by projecting behind the thing which they seek to account for too much of the author’s own habitual reflectiveness.[6]
Perhaps we shall the better see how theorists have been wont to ignore and to misunderstand the laughing experiences of the plain man if we examine at some length {9} the mode of dealing with the subject adopted by a writer who holds a high place among contemporary psychologists. Prof. Lipps has recently elaborated a theory of the ludicrous, illustrating it at some length.[7] This theory may be described as a modification of Kant’s, which places the cause of laughter in “the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing”. According to Lipps, we have the “comic” when “the little” measures itself with something else and so steps into the daylight. There is a mental movement (Vorstellungsbewegung) from a presentation relatively great or important to one relatively little or unimportant; and the impression of the comic depends on the nullification of the latter through its contrariety to the former and the disappointment which this involves. What may be called the belittling idea—which the reader must bear in mind is the important one—always comes first, the belittled or nullified one, always second.
In order to illustrate his point he takes among other examples that of a hat on the wrong head. A man topped by a child’s small cap, and a child covered with a man’s big hat are, he tells us, equally comical. But the reason is different in the two cases. In the first, starting with the perception of the worthy man, we expect an adequate head-covering, and this expectation is nullified by the obstinate presence of the tiny cap. Here, then, the funny feature, the belittled thing, is the diminutive cap. In the second case, however, the movement of thought is just the reverse. We here set out with the perception of the headgear, not with that of its wearer. It is the dignified man’s hat that now {10} first fixes our attention, and it is the obtrusion of the child beneath when we expect the proper wearer which is the comical feature. In other words, when a man puts on a baby’s cap it is the cap which is absurd, when a baby dons his father’s cylinder it is the baby which is absurd.
This is ingenious, one must confess, but does it not involve some twisting of facts? Would the unphilosophic humorist recognise this account of the ways of laughter? Has this account the note of familiarity with these ways? Let us see.
At the outset one may enter a modest protest against the quiet assumption that the two incidents here selected are laughable in an equal degree. It may be urged that, to the grown-up spectator at least, the sight of the little one crowned with the whelming headgear of his sire is immeasurably more amusing than the other. Here the author strikes one as proceeding rather hastily, as he seems to do also when he assumes that an exceptionally big and an exceptionally little nose are equally palpable examples of the laughable. This is, to say the least, disputable. One can hardly think of a comedy turning on the smallness of a person’s nose, as the Cyrano de Bergerac of M. Rostand turns on its bigness. But this objection need not, perhaps, be pressed.
Passing, then, to the explanation of his two examples offered by the author, we are first of all struck by the apparent arbitrariness of the supposition, that the movement of thought which he assumes should in the one case take exactly the reverse direction of that taken in the other. Seeing that both are instances of a grotesquely unsuitable head-covering should one not expect the enjoyment of them to spring out of a similar kind of mental activity? {11}
The author probably means to say that we tend to fix the attention on the more dignified feature in each case, the man beneath the tiny cap, and the man’s hat above the tiny head. But that is far from being certain. And in any case there are good reasons against assuming a “contrary motion” of thought here. Dr. Lipps will no doubt allow, as a trained psychologist, that these intellectual movements are subject to well-recognised laws. One deduction from these is that the sight of a hat will suggest the idea of the human figure to which it belongs much more certainly and more powerfully than the sight of the figure will suggest the idea of its appropriate covering. I believe that everybody’s experience will confirm this. A hat seen even in a shop-window starts the impulse to think of some wearer; but who would say that seeing a human head, say across the dinner-table or in an adjoining stall at the theatre, prompts us to think of its proper covering? Special circumstances, such as the presence of an exceptional baldness appealing to pity, must be added before our thoughts flit to the out-of-door receptacle. In other words, the whole interest and significance of a hat lie in a reference to a wearer, but not vice versâ.
We must, then, reject the idea of a double and opposed movement of thought here. If any movement takes place it must be assumed to be in each case a transition from the perception of the hat to the idea of its customary and proper wearer.
Now, are we aware when we laugh at either of these odd sights of carrying out this movement of thought? Keeping to the indisputable case of the child’s head under or in the man’s hat, do we, before the agreeable spasm seizes us, first mentally grasp the hat and then pass to the idea of its rightful wearer? I, at least, cannot find this to be true in {12} my own experience. But such inability may be due to the absence of a sufficiently delicate introspection. Let us then try to test the point in another way.