3.  Let us then return, for the last time, to our central image:  something mechanical encrusted on something living.  Here, the living being under discussion was a human being, a person.  A mechanical arrangement, on the other hand, is a thing.  What, therefore, incited laughter was the momentary transformation of a person into a thing, if one considers the image from this standpoint.  Let us then pass from the exact idea of a machine to the vaguer one of a thing in general.  We shall have a fresh series of laughable images which will be obtained by taking a blurred impression, so to speak, of the outlines of the former and will bring us to this new law:  We laugh every time A person gives us the impression of being A thing.

We laugh at Sancho Panza tumbled into a bed-quilt and tossed into the air like a football.  We laugh at Baron Munchausen turned into a cannon-ball and travelling through space.  But certain tricks of circus clowns might afford a still more precise exemplification of the same law.  True, we should have to eliminate the jokes, mere interpolations by the clown into his main theme, and keep in mind only the theme itself, that is to say, the divers attitudes, capers and movements which form the strictly “clownish” element in the clown’s art.  On two occasions only have I been able to observe this style of the comic in its unadulterated state, and in both I received the same impression.  The first time, the clowns came and went, collided, fell and jumped up again in a uniformly accelerated rhythm, visibly intent upon affecting a Crescendo.  And it was more and more to the jumping up again, the rebound, that the attention of the public was attracted.  Gradually, one lost sight of the fact that they were men of flesh and blood like ourselves; one began to think of bundles of all sorts, falling and knocking against each other.  Then the vision assumed a more definite aspect.  The forms grew rounder, the bodies rolled together and seemed to pick themselves up like balls.  Then at last appeared the image towards which the whole of this scene had doubtless been unconsciously evolving—­large rubber balls hurled against one another in every direction.  The second scene, though even coarser than the first, was no less instructive.  There came on the stage two men, each with an enormous head, bald as a billiard ball.  In their hands they carried large sticks which each, in turn, brought down on to the other’s cranium.  Here, again, a certain gradation was observable.  After each blow, the bodies seemed to grow heavier and more unyielding, overpowered by an increasing degree of rigidity.  Then came the return blow, in each case heavier and more resounding than the last, coming, too, after a longer interval.  The skulls gave forth a formidable ring throughout the silent house.  At last the two bodies, each quite rigid and as straight as an arrow, slowly bent over towards each other, the sticks came crashing down for the last time on to the two heads with a thud as of enormous mallets falling upon oaken beams, and the pair lay prone upon the ground.  At that instant appeared in all its vividness the suggestion that the two artists had gradually driven into the imagination of the spectators:  “We are about to become ...we have now become solid wooden dummies.”