We now see how it is that writers on wit have perforce confined themselves to commenting on the extraordinary complexity of the things denoted by the term without ever succeeding in defining it.  There are many ways of being witty, almost as many as there are of being the reverse.  How can we detect what they have in common with one another, unless we first determine the general relationship between the witty and the comic?  Once, however, this relationship is cleared up, everything is plain sailing.  We then find the same connection between the comic and the witty as exists between a regular scene and the fugitive suggestion of a possible one.  Hence, however numerous the forms assumed by the comic, wit will possess an equal number of corresponding varieties.  So that the comic, in all its forms, is what should be defined first, by discovering (a task which is already quite difficult enough) the clue that leads from one form to the other.  By that very operation wit will have been analysed, and will then appear as nothing more than the comic in a highly volatile state.  To follow the opposite plan, however, and attempt directly to evolve a formula for wit, would be courting certain failure.  What should we think of a chemist who, having ever so many jars of a certain substance in his laboratory, would prefer getting that substance from the atmosphere, in which merely infinitesimal traces of its vapour are to be found?

But this comparison between the witty and the comic is also indicative of the line we must take in studying the comic in words.  On the one hand, indeed, we find there is no essential difference between a word that is comic and one that is witty; on the other hand, the latter, although connected with a figure of speech, invariably calls up the image, dim or distinct, of a comic scene.  This amounts to saying that the comic in speech should correspond, point by point, with the comic in actions and in situations, and is nothing more, if one may so express oneself, than their projection on to the plane of words.  So let us return to the comic in actions and in situations, consider the chief methods by which it is obtained, and apply them to the choice of words and the building up of sentences.  We shall thus have every possible form of the comic in words as well as every variety of wit.

1.  Inadvertently to say or do what we have no intention of saying or doing, as a result of inelasticity or momentum, is, as we are aware, one of the main sources of the comic.  Thus, absentmindedness is essentially laughable, and so we laugh at anything rigid, ready-made, mechanical in gesture, attitude and even facial expression.  Do we find this kind of rigidity in language also?  No doubt we do, since language contains ready-made formulas and stereotyped phrases.  The man who always expressed himself in such terms would invariably be comic.  But if an isolated phrase is to be comic in itself, when once separated from the person who utters it, it must