mother and her son in the Faux Bonshommes: "My dear
boy, gambling on 'Change is very risky. You win one day and lose the
next."--"Well, then, I will gamble only every other day." In the same
play too we find the following edifying conversation between two
company-promoters: "Is this a very honourable thing we are doing? These
unfortunate shareholders, you see, we are taking the money out of their
very pockets...."--"Well, out of what do you expect us to take it?"

An amusing result is likewise obtainable whenever a symbol or an emblem
is expanded on its concrete side, and a pretence is made of retaining
the same symbolical value for this expansion as for the emblem itself.
In a very lively comedy we are introduced to a Monte Carlo official,
whose uniform is covered with medals, although he has only received a
single decoration. "You see, I staked my medal on a number at
roulette," he said, "and as the number turned up, I was entitled to
thirty-six times my stake." This reasoning is very similar to that
offered by Giboyer in the Effrontes. Criticism is made of a bride of
forty summers who is wearing orange-blossoms with her wedding costume:
"Why, she was entitled to oranges, let alone orange-blossoms!" remarked
Giboyer.

But we should never cease were we to take one by one all the laws we
have stated, and try to prove them on what we have called the plane of
language. We had better confine ourselves to the three general
propositions of the preceding section. We have shown that "series of
events" may become comic either by repetition, by inversion, or by
reciprocal interference. Now we shall see that this is also the case
with series of words.

To take series of events and repeat them in another key or another
environment, or to invert them whilst still leaving them a certain
meaning, or mix them up so that their respective meanings jostle one
another, is invariably comic, as we have already said, for it is
getting life to submit to be treated as a machine. But thought, too, is
a living thing. And language, the translation of thought, should be
just as living. We may thus surmise that a phrase is likely to become
comic if, though reversed, it still makes sense, or if it expresses
equally well two quite independent sets of ideas, or, finally, if it
has been obtained by transposing an idea into some key other than its
own. Such, indeed, are the three fundamental laws of what might be
called THE COMIC TRANSFORMATION OF SE