In the bigness of the lie is the gigantic quality of the liar. If, for
instance, we assume that no athlete has ever leapt higher than seven
feet, it is a lie to say that one has leapt eight. But it is not a
gigantic lie: it is a mean, stupid lie. The giant must not stoop so
low; he must leap, not eight feet, but eight score, eight hundred. He
must leap from nebula to nebula. If he does not claim to have achieved
the incredible he is incredible in the gigantic sense. Likewise he is
not comic unless he can shock our imagination by his very enormity. We
do not laugh at the pigmy who claims an eight-foot leap; we sneer.
Humour has many roots, and exaggeration is one of them, for it embodies
the essential incongruous; thus we need the incongruity of contrast
between the little strutting man and the enormous feat he claims to have
achieved.

If Muenchausen is comic it is because he is not afraid; his godfather,
the _Critical Review_,[7] rightly claimed that 'the marvellous had never
been carried to a more whimsical and ludicrous extent.' Because he was
not afraid, we say 'Absurd person,' and laugh, not at but with him. We
must laugh at the mental picture of the Lithuanian horse who so bravely
carried his master while he fought the Turk outside Oczakow, only to be
cut in two by the portcullis ... and then greedily drank at a fountain,
drank and drank until the fountain nearly ran dry because the water
spouted from his severed (but still indomitable) trunk! The impossible
is the comedy of Muenchausen; when he approaches the possible his mantle
seems to fall from him. For instance, in a contest with a bear, or
rather one of the contests, for Muenchausen seemed to encounter bears
wherever he went, he throws a bladder of spirits into the brute's face,
so that, blinded by the liquor, it rushes away and falls over a
precipice. This is a blemish; a mortal hunter might thus have saved
himself with his whisky-flask; this is not worthy of Muenchausen. For
Muenchausen, to be comic, must do what we cannot do, thrust his hand into
the jaws of a wolf, push on, seize him by the tail and turn him inside
out. Then he can leave us with this vision before our eyes of the
writhing animal nimbly treated as an old glove.

[Footnote 7: December, 1785.]

In such scenes as these contests with bears, wolves, lions, crocodiles,
the Baron is the chief actor, plays the part of comedian, but he is big
enough to shed round himself a zone of comic light. T