Note 287 — Chapter XI · THE LAUGHABLE IN ART: COMEDY.

M. Bergson, who gives a delightful account of these mechanical aids to the effect of comedy, seeks to connect them with his theory that the laughable consists in the substitution of the monotony of the machine for the variety of the organism (op. cit., p. 72 ff.). I suspect, however, that they owe much of the spell they cast over our laughing muscles to suggestions of child’s play.