ady
propounded in various forms, our answer must always be the same. The
rigid mechanism which we occasionally detect, as a foreign body, in the
living continuity of human affairs is of peculiar interest to us as
being a kind of ABSENTMINDEDNESS on the part of life. Were events
unceasingly mindful of their own course, there would be no
coincidences, no conjunctures and no circular series; everything would
evolve and progress continuously. And were all men always attentive to
life, were we constantly keeping in touch with others as well as with
ourselves, nothing within us would ever appear as due to the working of
strings or springs. The comic is that side of a person which reveals
his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its
peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of
automatism, of movement without life. Consequently it expresses an
individual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate
corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles
out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and in
events.

But this in turn tempts us to make further investigations. So far, we
have spent our time in rediscovering, in the diversions of the grownup
man, those mechanical combinations which amused him as a child. Our
methods, in fact, have been entirely empirical. Let us now attempt to
frame a full and methodical theory, by seeking, as it were, at the
fountainhead, the changeless and simple archetypes of the manifold and
transient practices of the comic stage. Comedy, we said, combines
events so as to introduce mechanism into the outer forms of life. Let
us now ascertain in what essential characteristics life, when viewed
from without, seems to contrast with mere mechanism. We shall only
have, then, to turn to the opposite characteristics, in order to
discover the abstract formula, this time a general and complete one,
for every real and possible method of comedy.

Life presents itself to us as evolution in time and complexity in
space. Regarded in time, it is the continuous evolution of a being ever
growing older; it never goes backwards and never repeats anything.
Considered in space, it exhibits certain coexisting elements so closely
interdependent, so exclusively made for one another, that not one of
them could, at the same time, belong to two different organisms: each
living being is a closed system of phenomena, incapable of inte