n account of their partial
resemblance to this model. They call up in our mind a more or less
confused image which we know to be comical. They range themselves in a
category representing an officially recognised type of the comic. The
scene of the "robber robbed" belongs to this class. It casts over a
host of other scenes a reflection of the comic element it contains. In
the end it renders comic any mishap that befalls one through one's own
fault, no matter what the fault or mishap may be,--nay, an allusion to
this mishap, a single word that recalls it, is sufficient. There would
be nothing amusing in the saying, "It serves you right, George Dandin,"
were it not for the comic overtones that take up and re-echo it.

3. We have dwelt at considerable length on repetition and inversion; we
now come to the reciprocal interference [Footnote: The word
"interference" has here the meaning given to it in Optics, where it
indicates the partial superposition and neutralisation, by each other,
of two series of light-waves.] of series. This is a comic effect, the
precise formula of which is very difficult to disentangle, by reason of
the extraordinary variety of forms in which it appears on the stage.
Perhaps it might be defined as follows: A situation is invariably comic
when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of
events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different
meanings at the same time.

You will at once think of an equivocal situation. And the equivocal
situation is indeed one which permits of two different meanings at the
same time, the one merely plausible, which is put forward by the
actors, the other a real one, which is given by the public. We see the
real meaning of the situation, because care has been taken to show us
every aspect of it; but each of the actors knows only one of these
aspects: hence the mistakes they make and the erroneous judgments they
pass both on what is going on around them and on what they are doing
themselves. We proceed from this erroneous judgment to the correct one,
we waver between the possible meaning and the real, and it is this
mental seesaw between two contrary interpretations which is at first
apparent in the enjoyment we derive from an equivocal situation. It is
natural that certain philosophers should have been specially struck by
this mental instability, and that some of them should regard the very
essence of the ludicrous as consisting in t