sionally, many a good
quality. Even though a list of all the peculiarities that have ever
been found ridiculous were drawn up, comedy would manage to add to
them, not indeed by creating artificial ones, but by discovering lines
of comic development that had hitherto gone unnoticed; thus does
imagination isolate ever fresh figures in the intricate design of one
and the same piece of tapestry. The essential condition, as we know, is
that the peculiarity observed should straightway appear as a kind of
CATEGORY into which a number of individuals can step.

Now, there are ready-made categories established by society itself, and
necessary to it because it is based on the division of labour. We mean
the various trades, public services and professions. Each particular
profession impresses on its corporate members certain habits of mind
and peculiarities of character in which they resemble each other and
also distinguish themselves from the rest. Small societies are thus
formed within the bosom of Society at large. Doubtless they arise from
the very organisation of Society as a whole. And yet, if they held too
much aloof, there would be a risk of their proving harmful to
sociability.

Now, it is the business of laughter to repress any separatist tendency.
Its function is to convert rigidity into plasticity, to readapt the
individual to the whole, in short, to round off the corners wherever
they are met with. Accordingly, we here find a species of the comic
whose varieties might be calculated beforehand. This we shall call the
PROFESSIONAL COMIC.

Instead of taking up these varieties in detail, we prefer to lay stress
upon what they have in common. In the forefront we find professional
vanity. Each one of M. Jourdain's teachers exalts his own art above all
the rest. In a play of Labiche there is a character who cannot
understand how it is possible to be anything else than a timber
merchant. Naturally he is a timber merchant himself. Note that vanity
here tends to merge into SOLEMNITY, in proportion to the degree of
quackery there is in the profession under consideration. For it is a
remarkable fact that the more questionable an art, science or
occupation is, the more those who practise it are inclined to regard
themselves as invested with a kind of priesthood and to claim that all
should bow before its mysteries. Useful professions are clearly meant
for the public, but those whose utility is more dubious can only
justify thei