I readily agree that when we make our perceptions reflective, as we may do, this idea is apt to emerge. As has been implied above, the sight of the tall hat does tend to suggest the idea of its usual wearer, and in lingering on this quaint bit of acting we may not improbably catch ourselves imagining the hat on the right {16} head, especially as we see that it is the child’s playful aim to personate the privileged owner. And the same thing might occur in laughing at the father topped with the small child’s hat; for the laugher, who would in this case more probably be a child, might naturally enough reinstate in imaginative thought the small child’s head to which the cap belongs. This combination seems at least to be much more likely to recur to the imagination than the other combination, which retaining the wearer substitutes the idea of the right hat.
How far any distinct image of the hat thus mentally transferred to the right wearer enters into the appreciation of this humorous spectacle, it would be hard to say. Different minds may behave differently here. Judging from my own experience I should say that at most only a vague “schematic” outline of the proper arrangement presents itself to the imagination. This seems to me to be what one might naturally expect. Laughter, as I conceive of it, fastens upon something human. It is the living wearer that is emphasised in the comical juxtaposition; we more naturally describe it as the child wearing his father’s hat, than as the father’s hat on the child. And for the comic effect it is sufficient that we recognise the hat to be the father’s. This we can do without mentally picturing the hat as worn by the father. The hat has become a symbol, and means for us the man’s hat and the dignity which belongs to this, though we may have at the time no mental image of it as worn by its rightful possessor.
Our examination seems to show that this apparently simple example of the laughable is very inadequately accounted for by supposing a movement of mind from one presentation or idea to another which contravenes and {17} nullifies the first. It may be added that, with respect to what is certainly present to our consciousness, when we look at this bit of child’s play we do not find the relation of part to part to be merely one of contrariety. A curious fact, not as yet fully studied by the psychologist, is what may be called the inter-diffusion of characters between the several parts of a complex presentation. The figure of a finely dressed lady in a gathering of poor people may either throw the shabby look of the latter into greater relief by contrast, or redeem it from its shabbiness by lending it some of its own glory. The latter effect is favoured by a certain contemplative attitude which disposes us to look at the whole as such, and with the least amount of inspection of details and their relations. When we regard the child in the big hat a semblance of the dignity which lies in the meaning of the latter is transferred to the small head; and the mental seizure of this transferred look of dignity by the spectator is essential to a full enjoyment of the show as a bit of make-believe, of innocent hypocrisy. Similarly, if we are disposed to laugh, a little contemptuously, at the man in the child’s hat, it is because the hat throws for half a moment over the heavy and lined face something of the fresh sweet look of infancy.[9]
It has seemed worth while to examine at some length the attempt of Dr. Lipps to deal with a simple instance of the laughable because, in spite of a recognisable effort to connect theory with concrete facts, it illustrates the common tendency to adapt the facts to the theory; and, further, the no less common tendency to overlook the rich variety of experience {18} which our laughter covers, the multiplicity of the sources of our merriment and the way in which these may co-operate in the enjoyable contemplation of a ludicrous object. As we shall see, theories of the ludicrous have again and again broken down from attempting to find one uniform cause in a domain where the operation of “Plurality of Causes” is particularly well marked.
It may be added that such theories, even if they were not one-sided and forced accounts of the sources of our merriment, would still suffer from one fatal defect: as Lotze says of Kant’s doctrine,[10] they make no attempt to show why the dissolved expectation or the failure to subsume a presentation under an idea should make us laugh, rather than, let us say, cough or sigh. Lotze, besides being a psychologist, was a physiologist, and it may be added, a humorist in a quiet way, and the reader of his lines who may have had the privilege of knowing him will see again the ironical little pout and the merry twinkle of the dark eye behind the words.
We have agreed that the discourser on the comic, however gravely philosophic he desires to be, must touch both finely and comprehensively the common experiences of mankind. Yet it may well be thought, in the light of the attempts made in the past, that this is demanding too much. The relish for things which feed our laughter is as we know a very variable endowment. As the Master tells us, “A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it more than in the tongue of him that makes it”. The facetiæ of earlier ages fall on modern ears with a sound as dull as that of an unstrung drum. It may well be that persons who pass a large number of their hours {19} in abstruse reflection grow incapable of enjoying many of the commoner varieties of laughter. Their capability of lapsing into the jocose vein becomes greatly restricted and may take directions that seem out-of-the-way to the more habitual laugher. Schopenhauer’s funny little attempt to extract a joke out of the meeting of the tangent and the circle seems to be a case in point. On reading some of the definitions of the ludicrous contributed by the fertile German mind, one is forced to conclude that the writers had their own peculiar, esoteric modes of laughter. When, for example, Herr St. Schütze, whose “attempt at a theory of the Comic” is pronounced by the renowned Th. Vischer to be “excellent” (vorzüglich), proceeds to define his subject in this way: “The comic is a perception or idea, which after some moments excites the obscure feeling that nature carries on a merry game with man while he thinks himself free to act, in which game the circumscribed liberty of man is mocked (verspottet) by a reference to a higher liberty,”[11] one seems to measure the scope of the worthy writer’s sense of fun. That the irony of things in their relation to our desires and aims has its amusing aspect is certain: but who that knows anything of the diversified forms of human mirth could ever think of trying to drag all of them under so narrow a rubric?
A vivid perception of the variability of the sense of the laughable in man, of the modification, in the case of individuals and of races, of the range of its play, and of the standards to which it subjects itself, by a thousand unknown influences of temperament and habits of life, may well repel not merely the philosophic recluse who can hardly be expected perhaps to have followed far the many wild {20} excursions of the laughing impulse, but others as well. Have we not, it may be asked, in the appreciation of what is funny or laughable a mode of sensibility pre-eminently erratic, knowing no law, and incapable therefore of being understood? Do not the more grotesque attempts to frame theories of the subject seem to mock the search for law where no law is?
The difficulty may be admitted whilst the practical conclusion drawn is rejected. Certainly no thinker will succeed in throwing light on the dark problem who does not strenuously fight against the narrowing influences of his “subjectivity,” who does not make a serious effort to get outside the bounds of his personal preferences, and to compass in large vision the far-ranging play of the mirthful spirit, and the endless differencing of its manifestations. But if a man can only succeed in doing this without losing his head in the somewhat rollicking scene, there is nothing that need repel him from the task; for reason assures us that here too, just as in other domains of human experience where things looked capricious and lawless enough at the outset, order and law will gradually disclose themselves.
A serious inquiry into the subject, such as we propose to make, must, it is evident, start from this scientific presupposition. We take the language of everyday life to imply that human laughter, notwithstanding its variability, its seeming caprices, is subject to law. We speak of an objective region of “the laughable,” that is of objects and relations of objects which are fitted and which tend to excite laughter in us all alike. It will be one of our chief problems to determine the characteristics of this field of the laughable, and to define its boundaries.
But a serious inquiry will take us farther than this. While we do well to insist that the lightness and {21} capriciousness of movement, the swift unpredictable coming and going, are of the essence of laughter, it will be one main object of this inquiry to show how our mirthful explosions, our sportive railleries, are attached at their very roots to our serious interests. Laughter, looked at from this point of view, has its significance as a function of the human organism, and as spreading its benefits over all the paths of life. We must probe this value of our laughing moments if we are to treat the subject adequately.