CHAPTER II

THE COMIC ELEMENT IN SITUATIONS AND THE COMIC ELEMENT IN WORDS





I

We have studied the comic element in forms, in attitudes, and in
movements generally; now let us look for it in actions and in
situations. We encounter, indeed, this kind of comic readily enough
in everyday life. It is not here, however, that it best lends itself
to analysis. Assuming that the stage is both a magnified and a
simplified view of life, we shall find that comedy is capable of
furnishing us with more information than real life on this
particular part of our subject. Perhaps we ought even to carry
simplification still farther, and, going back to our earliest
recollections, try to discover, in the games that amused us as
children, the first faint traces of the combinations that make us
laugh as grown-up persons. We are too apt to speak of our feelings
of pleasure and of pain as though full grown at birth, as though
each one of them had not a history of its own. Above all, we are too
apt to ignore the childish element, so to speak, latent in most of
our joyful emotions. And yet, how many of our present pleasures,
were we to examine them closely, would shrink into nothing more than