LXXI. Persons who pique themselves on their understanding are frequently reserved and haughty: persons who aim at wit are generally courteous and sociable. Those who depend at every turn on the applause of the company, must endeavour to conciliate the good opinion of others by every means in their power.
‘A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him who hears it.’
If a habit of jesting lowers a man, it is to the level of humanity. Wit nourishes vanity; reason has a much stronger tincture of pride in it.
LXXII. Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
LXXIII. Some persons can do nothing but ridicule others.
LXXIV. Parodists, like mimics, seize only on defects, or turn beauties into blemishes. They make bad writers and indifferent actors.
LXXV. People of the greatest gaiety of manners are often the dullest company imaginable. Nothing is so dreary as the serious conversation or writing of a professed wag. So the gravest persons, divines, mathematicians, and so on, make the worst and poorest jokes, puns, &c.
LXXVI. The expression of a Frenchman’s face is often as melancholy when he is by himself, as it is lively in conversation. The instant he ceases to talk, he becomes ‘quite chop-fallen.’
LXXVII. To point out defects, one would think it necessary to be equally conversant with beauties. But this is not the case. The best caricaturists cannot draw a common outline; nor the best comic actors speak a line of serious poetry without being laughed at. This may be perhaps accounted for in some degree by saying, that the perfection of the ludicrous implies that looseness or disjointedness of mind, which receives most delight and surprise from oddity and contrast, and which is naturally opposed to the steadiness and unity of feeling required for the serious, or the sublime and beautiful.