Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/415

Rh them; and if the view were true that queerness is the laughable element, those things that are strangest and most unusual should be the very ones most certain by their very nature to excite laughter. But we do not laugh at the dancing horses, the jumping pigs, the musicians playing on bottles, of the circus, all of which are most contradictory of what we are accustomed to. If we laugh at the circus, it is at the accessory jokes and incidents in the detail.

A conjuror's tricks, seemingly contradictory as they are of all our experiences and notions, do not make us laugh. We laugh at his jokes and his funny ways of proceeding, but wonder at the tricks.

In a theory proposed by M. Penjou in the Revue philosophique, laughter is excited by whatever appears as free and exempt from law, and as produced by a playful activity or the capricious manifestation of an unrestrained will, as in jokes, plays on words, equivocations, a schoolboy's pranks, deformities, or freaks of Nature. "The same cause of laughter," he says, "will be found in all the cases I can cite. . . . They always involve, under a thousand shadings, the sudden manifestation of a freedom that destroys our prepossessions, but without harm to us or real injury to others. However we may regard it, it is always this abrupt spontaneous outburst, with the entire absence of ostensible cause, that makes us laugh. . . . Spontaneity or liberty makes us laugh, and is, in fact, the essence of the amusing and the ludicrous in all their forms; and laughter is simply the expression of a liberty we feel, or of our own sympathy with the real or fancied manifestation of another's liberty, and is the natural echo in us of liberty." This hypothesis, with a few minor variations, is simply the theory of the odd.

We are ready to acknowledge that there is considerable truth in this view. Liberties are taken with words in a pun and with {Esthetics in a grimace. Such freedoms are, however, often exhibited to us without our feeling any inclination to laugh. For an extravagance or a caprice some trait which has not yet been determined must be present.

Another considerably prevalent theory supposes the abrupt perception of a contrast between the attempt and the outcome, the appearance and the reality, the mask and the face, the tone and the words, the form and the substance, that provokes laughter. "Laughing," says Hegel in his Æsthetics, "is a sign that we are wise enough to comprehend the contrast and take note of it." According to L. Dumont, it is occasioned by the conflict in our mind of two contradictory thoughts, causing a shock. "The recognition of an object," he says, "at first gives a certain impulse to our understanding and stimulates its activity in a certain direction, when immediately a contradictory impression of another quality of the same