There are moods, we said, which move us as soon us as soon as we perceive them, joys and sorrows with which we sympathise, passions and vices which call forth painful astonishment, terror or pity, in the beholder; in short, sentiments that are prolonged in sentimental overtones from mind to mind.  All this concerns the essentials of life.  All this is serious, at times even tragic.  Comedy can only begin at the point where our neighbour’s personality ceases to affect us.  It begins, in fact, with what might be called a growing callousness to social life.  Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own way without troubling himself about getting into touch with the rest of his fellow-beings.  It is the part of laughter to reprove his absentmindedness and wake him out of his dream.  If it is permissible to compare important things with trivial ones, we would call to mind what happens when a youth enters one of our military academies.  After getting through the dreaded ordeal of the examination, he finds the has other ordeals to face, which his seniors have arranged with the object of fitting him for the new life he is entering upon, or, as they say, of “breaking him into harness.”  Every small society that forms within the larger is thus impelled, by a vague kind of instinct, to devise some method of discipline or “breaking in,” so as to deal with the rigidity of habits that have been formed elsewhere and have now to undergo a partial modification.  Society, properly so-called, proceeds in exactly the same way.  Each member must be ever attentive to his social surroundings; he must model himself on his environment; in short, he must avoid shutting himself up in his own peculiar character as a philosopher in his ivory tower.  Therefore society holds suspended over each individual member, if not the threat of correction, at all events the prospect of a snubbing, which, although it is slight, is none the less dreaded.  Such must be the function of laughter.  Always rather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed, laughter is, really and truly, a kind of social “ragging.”

Hence the equivocal nature of the comic.  It belongs neither altogether to art nor altogether to life.  On the one hand, characters in real life would never make us laugh were we not capable of watching their vagaries in the same way as we look down at a play from our seat in a box; they are only comic in our eyes because they perform a kind of comedy before us.  But, on the other hand, the pleasure caused by laughter, even on the stage, is not an unadulterated enjoyment; it is not a pleasure that is exclusively esthetic or altogether disinterested.  It always implies a secret or unconscious intent, if not of each one of us, at all events of society as a whole.  In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbour, if not in his will, at least in his deed.  This is the reason a comedy is far more like real life