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theorists. Henri Bergson locates the comic essence in an “encrustation of the mechanical upon the organic.” Twins, for example, are humorous because duplication of individuals hints at a mechanical intervention in the species; a man slipping upon a banana peel is comic in that he behaves like a machine, rigidly perpetuating his motion without the foresight and allowances proper to vitality. By Bergson’s theory, the comic incident is a misapplication of momentum and the comic character is amonomaniac, which well enough describes the heroes of French farce but does not encompass such a nimble and many-faced comic hero as Shakespeare’s Falstaff.
    Confusingly, just as weeping can express joy as well as sorrow, laughter arises from states of mind that appear not merely various but even opposite: laughter can announce scorn and contempt, but may also be applause. Our laughter at Falstaff, for instance, has much applause and admiration in it, as well as feelings of superiority, and in literary humor especially, we find an ingredient of the genial. Within a comic work we are relaxed in a world of essential safety, where the dangers of death and destruction have been exchanged for mock penalties, for semblances of defeat and punishment that are erased by the next comic scene. The comic character, whether a cat in an animated cartoon or the hero of a classic like Don Quixote, is rubbery; he bounces back, and suffers no scars. Contrast the brittle, stony characters of Greek tragedy, who, under the unforgiving pressure of fate’s engines, irrevocably shatter.
    Sigmund Freud attempted to extend the methods of his dream analysis into the analysis of jokes. His book
Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious
explains jokes and examples of verbal wit and, by extension, all instances of the comic in terms of a difference in psychical expenditures; the characteristic joke sets up an instant of bewilderment, and laughter follows in the recognition that a kind of sense has been made, but different from what we expected. As Kant said, the comic is “an expectation that has turned to nothing.” Certainly jokes, like dreams, do function in a realm liberated from the laws of logic and logical consequence; and there is melancholy profundity in Freud’s tentative suggestion that humor, the art of the comic, is an intellectual adult attempt to recover “the lost laughter of childhood.”
    And what might be this original laughter, the laughter of childhood? A recent, popular, but not uninformative book called, a little provocatively,
The Naked Ape
, discusses, from a zoologist’s point of view, the origin of laughter. Desmond Morris first notes that crying is present from birth but laughter does not appear until the third or fourth month of life. It arises in circumstances like these: the mother, holding the child in her lap, pretends to let him drop, or does something else startling. The infant’s instinctive crying reaction is cancelled by his recognition that he is safe, that the mother is with him, and his cry merges with the parental-recognition gurgle that by this time is part of his vocabulary. Inthis manner, laughter is born. How many of the games parents instinctively play with infants, for instance, the tossing and clutching, the chasing and tickling, are in fact a systematic daring and scaring, a systematic widening of the circle of safely in which the children may feel privileged to laugh? A hundred and fifty years ago, William Hazlitt wrote this on the theory of laughter:
    If we hold a mask before our face, and approach a child with this disguise on, it will at first, from the oddity and incongruity of the appearance, be inclined to laugh; if we go nearer to it, steadily, and without saying a word, it will begin to be alarmed, and be half inclined to cry; if we suddenly take off the mask, it will recover from its fears, and burst out a-laughing; but if, instead of presenting the old well-known countenance, we have concealed a