upon as fundamental. They have less bearing on the actually comic
than on the field within which it must be sought.

I

The first point to which attention should be called is that the
comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A
landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant
and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal,
but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or
expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of,
in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that
men have given it,--the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It
is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has
not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers.
Several have defined man as "an animal which laughs." They might
equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for
if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same
effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the
stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the
ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as
though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it
fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm
and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter
has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not
laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even
with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our
affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a