Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/417

Rh of grave men makes us laugh for the same reason, because humanity is detected under its mask of gravity. Monkeys make us laugh because they by their grimaces and attitudes degrade the men they imitate to their own level. In general, fatuity, pretension, and affectation are ludicrous because vulgarity is betrayed under the mask at every instant.

Yet this is not the real cause, for we often witness the spectacle of a degradation without having any disposition to laugh at it. When we perceive a pettiness in a person for whom we have reverence, we are only sorry. We do not always laugh when the eccentricity of another is exposed. Our laughing depends much on the way the exposure is made. Thus, not the odd or the exhibition of freedom or contrast or degradation is the real cause of laughter. There are queer spectacles that are not amusing, free actions that are austere, contrasts that are sad, and degradations that are solemn. The one thing that is always present, that provokes laughter, to suppress which is to suppress laughter, a variation of which has an immediate effect on the intensity of the emotion of the ludicrous, is still to be found.

Let us study a few cases; first, of what we find to amuse us in acts, and then in words. We find the application of great effort to move a load that proves to be a trifle, ludicrous; as when a man exerts all his strength to force open a door that yields at a touch, or when the clown on the stage brings all his strength to bear to lift the mock cannon ball which we know is only pasteboard. Our first impression of such actions is that they are strange or absurd. Such Herculean efforts to raise a load we know to be trifling, to overcome a resistance which we know is as nothing, are, on the first impression, incomprehensible. A second impression, however, comes on, which the psychologists seem to have missed, and which may go far to account for the ludicrous aspect of the proceeding. A rapid process of thought within us makes the act which at first seems absurd appear natural from the point of view of the actor. We think that the man supposed the door was solidly fastened, and the clown that he had a real cannon ball to lift. The effort they made was therefore natural; we should have strained ourselves too if we had been in their place, and all for nothing; and we laugh at that. What seemed queer was simply natural, an unusual fact was a habitual one, and what we thought was surprising was after all familiar. We experience a sudden revulsion of feeling, and are amused.

So in words and expressions which we regard as witty or funny. They are first presented to us in a sense and with associations which seem queer or remote; then we find that they have also a natural