halts, never repeats itself.  It must be changing every moment, for to cease to change would be to cease to live.  Then let gesture display a like animation!  Let it accept the fundamental law of life, which is the complete negation of repetition!  But I find that a certain movement of head or arm, a movement always the same, seems to return at regular intervals.  If I notice it and it succeeds in diverting my attention, if I wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it, then involuntarily I laugh.  Why?  Because I now have before me a machine that works automatically.  This is no longer life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it.  It belongs to the comic.

This is also the reason why gestures, at which we never dreamt of laughing, become laughable when imitated by another individual.  The most elaborate explanations have been offered for this extremely simple fact.  A little reflection, however, will show that our mental state is ever changing, and that if our gestures faithfully followed these inner movements, if they were as fully alive as we, they would never repeat themselves, and so would keep imitation at bay.  We begin, then, to become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves.  I mean our gestures can only be imitated in their mechanical uniformity, and therefore exactly in what is alien to our living personality.  To imitate any one is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into his person.  And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no wonder that imitation gives rise to laughter.

Still, if the imitation of gestures is intrinsically laughable, it will become even more so when it busies itself in deflecting them, though without altering their form, towards some mechanical occupation, such as sawing wood, striking on an anvil, or tugging away at an imaginary bell-rope.  Not that vulgarity is the essence of the comic,—­although certainly it is to some extent an ingredient,—­ but rather that the incriminated gesture seems more frankly mechanical when it can be connected with a simple operation, as though it were intentionally mechanical.  To suggest this mechanical interpretation ought to be one of the favourite devices of parody.  We have reached this result through deduction, but I imagine clowns have long had an intuition of the fact.

This seems to me the solution of the little riddle propounded by Pascal in one passage of his Thoughts:  “Two faces that are alike, although neither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh when together, on account of their likeness.”  It might just as well be said:  “The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition.”  The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself.  Wherever there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at work behind the living.  Analyse the impression you get from two faces that are too much alike, and you will find that you are thinking of two copies cast in the same mould, or two impressions of the same seal, or two reproductions of the same negative,—­in a word, of some manufacturing process or other.  This deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of laughter.