THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CAUSE OF LAUGHTER. 399 



them; and if tlie view were true that queerness is the laughable 

 element, those things that are strangest and most unusual should be 

 the very ones most certain by their very nature to excite laughter. 

 But we do not laugh at the dancing horses, the jumping pigs, the 

 musicians playing on bottles, of the circus, all of which are most 

 contradictory of what we are accustomed to. If we laugh at the 

 circus, it is at the accessory jokes and incidents in the detail. 



A conjuror's tricks, seemingly contradictory as they are of all 

 our experiences and notions, do not make us laugh. We laugh at his 

 jokes and his funny ways of proceeding, but wonder at the tricks. 



In a theory proposed by M. Penjou in the Revue philosophique, 

 laughter is excited by whatever appears as free and exempt from 

 law, and as produced by a playful activity or the capricious mani- 

 festation of an unrestrained will, as in jokes, plays on words, equivo- 

 cations, a schoolboy's pranks, deformities, or freaks of Nature. " The 

 same cause of laughter," he says, " will be found in all the cases I can 

 cite. . . . They always involve, under a thousand shadings, the 

 sudden manifestation of a freedom that destroys our prepossessions, 

 but without harm to us or real injury to others. However we may 

 regard it, it is always this abrupt spontaneous outburst, with the 

 entire absence of ostensible cause, that makes us laugh. . . . Spon- 

 taneity or liberty makes us laugh, and is, in fact, the essence of the 

 amusing and the ludicrous in all their forms; and laughter is simply 

 the expression of a liberty we feel, or of our own sympathy with the 

 real or fancied manifestation of another's liberty, and is the natural 

 echo in us of liberty." This hypothesis, with a few minor variations, 

 is simply the theory of the odd. 



We are ready to acknowledge that there is considerable truth 

 in this view. Liberties are taken with words in a pun and with 

 {Esthetics in a grimace. Such freedoms are, however, often exhibited 

 to us without our feeling any inclination to laugh. For an extrava- 

 gance or a caprice some trait which has not yet been determined 

 must be present. 



Another considerably prevalent theory supposes the abrupt per- 

 ception of a contrast between the attempt and the outcome, the 

 appearance and the reality, the mask and the face, the tone and 

 the words, the form and the substance, that provokes laughter. 

 " Laughing," says Hegel in his ^Esthetics, " is a sign that we are wise 

 enough to comprehend the contrast and take note of it." According 

 to L. Dumont, it is occasioned by the conflict in our mind of two 

 contradictory thoughts, causing a shock. " The recognition of an 

 object," he says, " at first gives a certain impulse to our understand- 

 ing and stimulates its activity in a certain direction, when immedi- 

 ately a contradictory impression of another quality of the same 



