If we do sympathize, the comic object ceases to be comical and
becomes pathetic. We can find the follies and sins of men comical just
so long as we do not sympathize with the sufferings which they entail.
There is nothing comical that may not also become pathetic; and the
difference depends exactly on the presence or absence of sympathy.
Nothing, for example, is more pathetic than death; yet if you keep
yourself free of its sorrow, there is nothing more comical--that man,
a little lower in his own estimation than the angels, should come to
this, a lump of clay.
It is unquestionably true that a free, disinterested attitude is
essential to comedy. You must not let yourself be carried away by any
feeling; if you are over-serious you cannot laugh; you must keep to
reflection and comparison. Yet this attitude is not utterly destructive
of all feeling. Man is complex enough at once to feel and to reflect.
He can pity as well as laugh. The pathetic and the comic are constantly
conjoined--witness our feeling towards Don Quixote or towards any of
the great characters of Thackeray--we do not know whether to laugh or
to cry. And in the most effective comedy, the standard applied to the
comical object is not foreign, but rather, as we have observed, the
implicit standard of the object itself, discernible only by the most
intimate acquaintance with it. The sting of laughter comes from our
acceptance of it as valid for ourselves; we blush and join in the laugh
at ourselves.
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