But why is it we laugh at this mechanical arrangement?  It is doubtless strange that the history of a person or of a group should sometimes appear like a game worked by strings, or gearings, or springs; but from what source does the special character of this strangeness arise?  What is it that makes it laughable?  To this question, which we have already propounded in various forms, our answer must always be the same.  The rigid mechanism which we occasionally detect, as a foreign body, in the living continuity of human affairs is of peculiar interest to us as being a kind of absentmindedness on the part of life.  Were events unceasingly mindful of their own course, there would be no coincidences, no conjunctures and no circular series; everything would evolve and progress continuously.  And were all men always attentive to life, were we constantly keeping in touch with others as well as with ourselves, nothing within us would ever appear as due to the working of strings or springs.  The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life.  Consequently it expresses an individual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate corrective.  This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and in events.

But this in turn tempts us to make further investigations.  So far, we have spent our time in rediscovering, in the diversions of the grownup man, those mechanical combinations which amused him as a child.  Our methods, in fact, have been entirely empirical.  Let us now attempt to frame a full and methodical theory, by seeking, as it were, at the fountainhead, the changeless and simple archetypes of the manifold and transient practices of the comic stage.  Comedy, we said, combines events so as to introduce mechanism into the outer forms of life.  Let us now ascertain in what essential characteristics life, when viewed from without, seems to contrast with mere mechanism.  We shall only have, then, to turn to the opposite characteristics, in order to discover the abstract formula, this time a general and complete one, for every real and possible method of comedy.

Life presents itself to us as evolution in time and complexity in space.  Regarded in time, it is the continuous evolution of a being ever growing older; it never goes backwards and never repeats anything.  Considered in space, it exhibits certain coexisting elements so closely interdependent, so exclusively made for one another, that not one of them could, at the same time, belong to two different organisms:  each living being is a closed system of phenomena, incapable of interfering with other systems.  A continual change of aspect, the irreversibility of the order of phenomena, the perfect individuality of a perfectly self-contained series:  such, then,