Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/26

 the simply ludicrous has its origin in the surprise caused by something which interrupts or modifies an ordinary procedure: the latter is thus joined for a moment to an idea not belonging to it. Why do we laugh when a person tumbles upstairs? or when some respectable female struggles with an umbrella which has shamelessly turned its bare ribs upon her and sails jauntily with her down the street, or flounders in the gutter, an inebriated wreck of usefulness? Because an erect position is the normal one for man, and a protecting umbrella the helpmeet for woman. If it were not so, we should laugh to see the most revered person succeed in controlling her gingham dome, and stemming the tide as easily as the whale which furnished it with bones. There is nothing essentially ludicrous in seeing a man chase an animal: on the contrary, if you are trying to head off your favorite pig and persuade it to taste again your bounty, it is one of the saddest spectacles in existence. But when a man is in full hue and cry after his own hat we laugh, because a hat is inseparable from a head in idea, but becomes separated in fact. A hatter's shop is full of the larvæ of this idea, but they would never hatch there into hats. The conjunction of a head to each is needed to make a perfect notion of a hat.

If we could be sure of preserving our own scalps, we should like to have been near enough to watch the expression of the first Indian who ever killed a man wearing a wig. For the wig is a sudden violation of the logic of scalping, and the astonished Indian would have raised a laugh as he raised the artificial hair.