What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-
andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and
a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us
invariably the same essence from which so many different products
borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The
greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this
little problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of
slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge
flung at philosophic speculation. Our excuse for attacking the
problem in our turn must lie in the fact that we shall not aim at
imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it,
above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall
treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine ourselves to
watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible gradations
from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the strangest
metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybe we may
gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that, something
more flexible than an abstract definition,--a practical, intimate
acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship. And maybe
we may also find that, unintentionally, we have made an acquaintance
that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in
its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness. It
dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are
at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group. Can
it then fail to throw light for us on the way that human imagination
works, and more particularly social, collective, and popular
imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not
also have something of its own to tell us about art and life?

At the outset we shall put forward three observations which we look