Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/380

 comical. The child laughs in the same case out of a feeling of superiority or out of joy over the calamity of others. It amounts to saying: “You fell, but I did not.” Certain pleasure motives of the child seems to be lost for us grown-ups, but as a substitute for these we perceive under the same conditions the “comic” feeling.

The Infantile and the Comic

If we were permitted to generalize, it would seem very tempting to transfer the desired specific character of the comic into the awakening of the infantile, and to conceive the comic as a regaining of “lost infantile laughing.” One could then say, “I laugh every time over a difference of expenditure between the other and myself, when I discover in the other the child.” Or expressed more precisely, the whole comparison leading to the comic would read as follows:

“He does it this way—I do it differently—

He does it just as I did when I was a child.”

This laughter would thus result every time from the comparison between the ego of the grown-up and the ego of the child. The uncertainty itself of the comic difference, causing now