to which the scene evidently
belongs: by this means you reduce the witty remark to its simplest
elements and obtain a full explanation of it.

Let us apply this method to a classic example. "Your chest hurts me"
(J'AI MAL A VOTRE POITRINE) wrote Mme. de Sevigne to her ailing
daughter--clearly a witty saying. If our theory is correct, we need
only lay stress upon the saying, enlarge and magnify it, and we shall
see it expand into a comic scene. Now, we find this very scene, ready
made, in the AMOUR MEDECIN of Moliere. The sham doctor, Clitandre, who
has been summoned to attend Sganarelle's daughter, contents himself
with feeling Sganarelle's own pulse, whereupon, relying on the sympathy
there must be between father and daughter, he unhesitatingly concludes:
"Your daughter is very ill!" Here we have the transition from the witty
to the comical. To complete our analysis, then, all we have to do is to
discover what there is comical in the idea of giving a diagnosis of the
child after sounding the father or the mother. Well, we know that one
essential form of comic fancy lies in picturing to ourselves a living
person as a kind of jointed dancing-doll, and that frequently, with the
object of inducing us to form this mental picture, we are shown two or
more persons speaking and acting as though attached to one another by
invisible strings. Is not this the idea here suggested when we are led
to materialise, so to speak, the sympathy we postulate as existing
between father and daughter?

We now see how it is that writers on wit have perforce confined
themselves to commenting on the extraordinary complexity of the things
denoted by the term without ever succeeding in defining it. There are
many ways of being witty, almost as many as there are of being the
reverse. How can we detect what they have in common with one another,
unless we first determine the general relationship between the witty
and the comic? Once, however, this relationship is cleared up,
everything is plain sailing. We then find the same connection between
the comic and the witty as exists between a regular scene and the
fugitive suggestion of a possible one. Hence, however numerous the
forms assumed by the comic, wit will possess an equal number of
corresponding varieties. So that the comic, in all its forms, is what
should be defined first, by discovering (a task which is already quite
difficult enough) the clue that leads from one form to the other. By
that v