Who are the actors in these scenes?  With whom has the wit to deal?  First of all, with his interlocutors themselves, when his witticism is a direct retort to one of them.  Often with an absent person whom he supposes to have spoken and to whom he is replying.  Still oftener, with the whole world,—­in the ordinary meaning of the term,—­which he takes to task, twisting a current idea into a paradox, or making use of a hackneyed phrase, or parodying some quotation or proverb.  If we compare these scenes in miniature with one another, we find they are almost always variations of a comic theme with which we are well acquainted, that of the “robber robbed.”  You take up a metaphor, a phrase, an argument, and turn it against the man who is, or might be, its author, so that he is made to say what he did not mean to say and lets himself be caught, to some extent, in the toils of language.  But the theme of the “robber robbed” is not the only possible one.  We have gone over many varieties of the comic, and there is not one of them that is incapable of being volatilised into a witticism.

Every witty remark, then, lends itself to an analysis, whose chemical formula, so to say, we are now in a position to state.  It runs as follows:  Take the remark, first enlarge it into a regular scene, then find out the category of the comic to which the scene evidently belongs:  by this means you reduce the witty remark to its simplest elements and obtain a full explanation of it.

Let us apply this method to a classic example.  “Your chest hurts me” (J’AI mal A VOTRE poitrine) wrote Mme. de Sevigne to her ailing daughter—­clearly a witty saying.  If our theory is correct, we need only lay stress upon the saying, enlarge and magnify it, and we shall see it expand into a comic scene.  Now, we find this very scene, ready made, in the Amour medecin of Moliere.  The sham doctor, Clitandre, who has been summoned to attend Sganarelle’s daughter, contents himself with feeling Sganarelle’s own pulse, whereupon, relying on the sympathy there must be between father and daughter, he unhesitatingly concludes:  “Your daughter is very ill!” Here we have the transition from the witty to the comical.  To complete our analysis, then, all we have to do is to discover what there is comical in the idea of giving a diagnosis of the child after sounding the father or the mother.  Well, we know that one essential form of comic fancy lies in picturing to ourselves a living person as a kind of jointed dancing-doll, and that frequently, with the object of inducing us to form this mental picture, we are shown two or more persons speaking and acting as though attached to one another by invisible strings.  Is not this the idea here suggested when we are led to materialise, so to speak, the sympathy we postulate as existing between father and daughter?