will become even more so when it busies itself in deflecting them,
though without altering their form, towards some mechanical
occupation, such as sawing wood, striking on an anvil, or tugging
away at an imaginary bell-rope. Not that vulgarity is the essence of
the comic,--although certainly it is to some extent an ingredient,--
but rather that the incriminated gesture seems more frankly
mechanical when it can be connected with a simple operation, as
though it were intentionally mechanical. To suggest this mechanical
interpretation ought to be one of the favourite devices of parody.
We have reached this result through deduction, but I imagine clowns
have long had an intuition of the fact.

This seems to me the solution of the little riddle propounded by
Pascal in one passage of his Thoughts: "Two faces that are alike,
although neither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh
when together, on account of their likeness." It might just as well
be said: "The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is
laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition." The truth
is that a really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever
there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some
mechanism at work behind the living. Analyse the impression you get
from two faces that are too much alike, and you will find that you
are thinking of two copies cast in the same mould, or two
impressions of the same seal, or two reproductions of the same
negative,--in a word, of some manufacturing process or other. This
deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of
laughter.

And laughter will be more pronounced still, if we find on the stage
not merely two characters, as in the example from Pascal, but