t le plus beau jour de ma vie," said M. Prudhomme.
Translate the phrase into English or German and it becomes purely
absurd, though it is comic enough in French. The reason is that "le
plus beau jour de ma vie" is one of those ready-made phrase-endings to
which a Frenchman's ear is accustomed. To make it comic, then, we need
only clearly indicate the automatism of the person who utters it. This
is what we get when we introduce an absurdity into the phrase. Here the
absurdity is by no means the source of the comic, it is only a very
simple and effective means of making it obvious.

We have quoted only one saying of M. Prudhomme, but the majority of
those attributed to him belong to the same class. M. Prudhomme is a man
of ready-made phrases. And as there are ready-made phrases in all
languages, M. Prudhomme is always capable of being transposed, though
seldom of being translated. At times the commonplace phrase, under
cover of which the absurdity slips in, is not so readily noticeable. "I
don't like working between meals," said a lazy lout. There would be
nothing amusing in the saying did there not exist that salutary precept
in the realm of hygiene: "One should not eat between meals."

Sometimes, too, the effect is a complicated one. Instead of one
commonplace phrase-form, there are two or three which are dovetailed
into each other. Take, for instance, the remark of one of the
characters in a play by Labiche, "Only God has the right to kill His
fellow-creature." It would seem that advantage is here taken of two
separate familiar sayings; "It is God who disposes of the lives of
men," and, "It is criminal for a man to kill his fellow-creature." But
the two sayings are combined so as to deceive the ear and leave the
impression of being one of those hackneyed sentences that are accepted
as a matter of course. Hence our attention nods, until we are suddenly
aroused by the absurdity of the meaning. These examples suffice to show
how one of the most important types of the comic can be projected--in a
simplified form--on the plane of speech. We will now proceed to a form
which is not so general.

2. "We laugh if our attention is diverted to the physical in a person
when it is the moral that is in question," is a law we laid down in the
first part of this work. Let us apply it to language. Most words might
be said to have a PHYSICAL and a MORAL meaning, according as they are
interpreted literally or figuratively. Every word, i