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Laughter : an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Henri Bergson
page 44 of 129 (34%)
point of making us believe that no change takes place in the prefect
when he changes his name, and that the function gets carried on
independently of the functionary.

We have now reached a point very far from the original cause of
laughter. Many a comic form, that cannot be explained by itself, can
indeed only be understood from its resemblance to another, which
only makes us laugh by reason of its relationship with a third, and
so on indefinitely, so that psychological analysis, however luminous
and searching, will go astray unless it holds the thread along which
the comic impression has travelled from one end of the series to the
other. Where does this progressive continuity come from? What can be
the driving force, the strange impulse which causes the comic to
glide thus from image to image, farther and farther away from the
starting-point, until it is broken up and lost in infinitely remote
analogies? But what is that force which divides and subdivides the
branches of a tree into smaller boughs and its roots into radicles?
An inexorable law dooms every living energy, during the brief
interval allotted to it in time, to cover the widest possible extent
in space. Now, comic fancy is indeed a living energy, a strange
plant that has nourished on the stony portions of the social soil,
until such time as culture should allow it to vie with the most
refined products of art. True, we are far from great art in the
examples of the comic we have just been reviewing. But we shall draw
nearer to it, though without attaining to it completely, in the
following chapter. Below art, we find artifice, and it is this zone
of artifice, midway between nature and art, that we are now about to
enter. We are going to deal with the comic playwright and the wit.


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