sort of impression is conveyed to our imagination; in both, then,
the comic is of the same kind. Here, once more, it has been our aim
to follow the natural trend of the movement of the imagination. This
trend or direction, it may be remembered, was the second of those
offered to us, starting from a central image. A third and final path
remains unexplored, along which we will now proceed.

3. Let us then return, for the last time, to our central image:
something mechanical encrusted on something living. Here, the living
being under discussion was a human being, a person. A mechanical
arrangement, on the other hand, is a thing. What, therefore, incited
laughter was the momentary transformation of a person into a thing,
if one considers the image from this standpoint. Let us then pass
from the exact idea of a machine to the vaguer one of a thing in
general. We shall have a fresh series of laughable images which will
be obtained by taking a blurred impression, so to speak, of the
outlines of the former and will bring us to this new law: WE LAUGH
EVERY TIME A PERSON GIVES US THE IMPRESSION OF BEING A THING.

We laugh at Sancho Panza tumbled into a bed-quilt and tossed into
the air like a football. We laugh at Baron Munchausen turned into a
cannon-ball and travelling through space. But certain tricks of
circus clowns might afford a still more precise exemplification of
the same law. True, we should have to eliminate the jokes, mere
interpolations by the clown into his main theme, and keep in mind
only the theme itself, that is to say, the divers attitudes, capers
and movements which form the strictly "clownish" element in the
clown's art. On two occasions only have I been able to observe this
style of the comic in its unadulterated state, and in both I
received the same impression. The first time, the clowns came and