Third Section: The Comical

Chapter 36: The Sense of the Comical and Its Forms

a) Heartless and hearty merriment

The comical, as a theme of aesthetics, belongs to a considerably narrower domain than, say, the sublime and the charming; it becomes dominant only in one art, literature. No doubt, drawing and painting are familiar with it also – think, for example of caricature – but it does not play a very large role there. It is essentially foreign to music and architecture; it slips occasionally into program music – but then only through the medium of words, whose accompaniment is music. (413) Otherwise, life, too – without art – is filled with comedy. But think: would we see it there without the poet’s eye?

Within certain limits, we would. We have – so far as our eye for it reaches –much fun in life from the unintentional comedy of human behavior. Every clumsiness, every slip, every missed intention, can cause us to laugh. Laughter in such cases may be quite heartless, for the laugh is always on the loser.

What is mocking laughter? First, it is nothing more than taking pleasure in unintended comedy in life. Beyond that, it can become very unpleasant, if it deliberately seeks out weaknesses and enlarges them, and in that form abandons them to the laughter of others. Mockery is never fair.

But is the merriment with which we acknowledge receipt of the comical in life fair? Is it not also quite heartless and insensitive? An observer stands there and looks upon the bad luck of his fellow man – perhaps nothing really terrible, just annoying to the victim – and draws amusement from it. Even when that amusement has nothing of schadenfreude in it, it still contains rejection and destruction. Everyone knows, of course, that laughter can “kill.” There are men who live inwardly solely by making fun of others. Every small mistake is magnified and made use of in a joke, and the victim is belittled.

One may ask, in the face of this situation: in the comical, have we really to do with an aesthetic value, is it at all an enjoyment of beauty, an aesthetical experience?

The answer is: yes! For the question here is not about the moral value or disvalue of an aesthetical attitude, but purely about its aesthetical character. This character can rightly exist; it can also have an entirely aesthetical character, even when the attitude has a morally questionable aspect.

Yet it need not have such an attitude. Merriment, such as the comical produces, can be entirely harmless. Take the phenomenon on its lighter side: the delight in the comical in life does not always have to tend towards schadenfreude – and perhaps it does that only among the morally immature; to a more mature man, a different nuance in this attitude is more natural. He looks at the matter, laughs a moment or smiles a bit, and then forgets about it. Those little annoying calamities are so very familiar! …

That is no proof that delight in the comical is an aesthetical delight, but it does prove that it can be, that is, it shows how the proximity to a heartless and insensitive attitude does not prevent it from being an aesthetical one. As an aesthetical attitude, the heartless delight in a comical scene, may be different from a hearty and sympathetic one; aesthetical delight in the comical as such is, despite that difference, as much one as the other. The (414) difference in the attitude is primarily a moral one. This first tends towards frivolity and arrogance; the second displays a trace of wisdom.

The genuine aesthetical character of delight in both of those cases consists in its being purely objective and without practical interest. It is not aimed at the person affected, but at the phenomenon, the happening as such. Pity and schadenfreude, which also may be present in it, do not belong to the aesthetical phenomenon but to the ethical response to it.

That the latter is also provoked lies in the nature of the happening. What makes us laugh is always something out of the arena of human weakness, smallness, pettiness, or arrogance or stupidity (folly!); a bit of confused thinking suffices for it, especially when the thinking pretends to be deep wisdom. In short, every kind of nonsense may come in play here, with conceit, haughtiness, and pretentiousness in the lead; more harmless is simple clumsiness, and whatever else is tied to externalities and to chance.

If we examine these human weaknesses, we find that they are essentially moral weaknesses, and that they very well deserve moral censure. If in life a haughty man is brought down, a sophist or hypocrite revealed as such, the delight of the observer is not as heartless as it may appear, and the laughter such men inspire is justified.

In all such things, there is also an element of the tragic and the touching. For haughtiness, conceit, pettiness, confusion, may have very serious consequences. And, depending on the sphere to which they belong, they are heart-rending or horrifying – the essential matter is only that the same thing be looked upon here from quite different sides; these other sides lie in the extended contexts of life – in places where man no longer has the consequences of his actions under his control. They take on the weight of earnestness and of importance only through these consequences. The comical and the delight taken in it stay on this side of these far-reaching contexts. For that reason, we can take delight in the light side of the same phenomena: “light” literally, without the moral weight that is often attached to them.

Is man, then, an artist in life – without otherwise being one? The ability to see the humor in things is, after all, a specific talent that not everyone possesses, one that a man may perhaps be born with just as much as with genuine artistic predispositions. But an affirmative answer to this question must be taken with caution: among mature men with some experience of life there are very many who have this gift at their disposal – only in such a modulated way that we do not notice it at all in those who have relatively little of it.

Another thing counts against it, viz., a practical interest lies in close proximity – quite this side of all aesthetical attitudes (415) – to taking life on its lighter side: it allows a person to manage the entire miscellany that he encounters if he is not concerned in a close and personal way with it. In the bustle of everyday life, everything has both its earnest and its absurd aspects; it is no doubt morally comforting to remain focused on the latter, so far as that may be possible.

As soon as some event touches a man’s own person, he loses his sense of humor. Still, until he reaches that point, he encounters many events that do not concern him personally. Then we have the attitudes of devil-may-care, of laughter, of thinking everything funny as a mode of coping, of having done with matters, of making life easier.

In short, behind this attitude stands a well-tested way of life. This latter gives an impulse to the gift of humor. Where this way of life meets with that gift, it strengthens it considerably. And what is peculiar is that this practical tendency often goes hand in hand with a genuine aesthetically autonomous stance toward life.

b) Unintentional comedy and humor

“The comical and humor” – the two surely belong close beside each other, but are not only not the same, they do not even stand at all formally in parallel. The comical is a matter of the object, its quality – if only “for” a subject, as is true for all aesthetic objects – while, in contrast, humor is a matter of the observer or the creator (of the writer or the actor). For it concerns the manner in which men look upon the comical, understand it, give an account of it, or put it to literary use. Thus, one does not bring the two phenomena, otherwise related to each other, into too close proximity. They are so as much unlike each other as music and musicality, the laws of mathematics and the art of reckoning (aptitude for doing sums in one’s head.)

This fact has usually been overlooked in works on aesthetics. One is accustomed to place humor next to comedy as one would a second phenomenon of the same genus, or would subordinate humor to the comical as a species. Both assumptions are false. The humorist is not comical; one does not laugh at him, but with him at something else, viz., the object of his humor, and indeed because he is able to show us the comical in this object. In fact, humor itself in not comical!

It is exactly the same in the other direction: the comical man is not humorous; usually he lacks even the humor needed to see the comedy in himself. That, precisely, makes him even more comical – when he gets annoyed or enraged instead of laughing, as a man full of humor would. His comedy is inadvertent.

All genuine comedy that we encounter in life is unintentional. On stage, comedy is done willingly, where a man consciously makes a comical object out of himself; but it is an acted-out comedy. Such comedy can, when intended sincerely, be far superior to the unintentional variety, yet it is (416) something different, and is related to unintentional comedy as, in general, play to life. The actor requires for this a very peculiar gift, one that is not given to every actor: the gift of humor.

Of course, a humorist needs a certain kind of humor (representational humor), the teller of anecdotes needs another kind (entertaining humor), the observer of human folly needs still another (smiling humor), likewise the soldier who emerges with a jest from the debris a grenade threw upon him (black humor). But that is all a matter for a more specific analysis.

In the same way, the comedy of poetic figures in plays and novels must always be unintended comedy. For if in life only comedy of that nature seems genuine, so quite naturally it will also seem to be so in literature and in the theater. That the actor produces such effects onstage through his art changes nothing; just as little as the fact that the writer considers the matter and puts it in words. It is not a question of reality here, but of appearance.

For that reason, in literature and drama it is essential that comedy “seem” genuine. That means: it must seem as it would in life, if we could observe it there with the same intense concentration by which literature focuses us upon the comedy. Or, stating it as a principle: since in art we are concerned with an appearance that is intended to seem lifelike, the appearing comedy of characters (and situations) that are created by a writer must necessarily be of this unintended kind. It must seem as if it were not composed by a writer who “wanted” events that way, and even less by the actors who realize it artistically onstage, but as if it came about involuntarily in a chance coming together of diverse events.

On the other hand, there is a talent the writer needs in giving shape to the comedy of his characters and bringing them to appearance as though they were not created by him, viz., Humor. What kind of humor is needed here depends upon the kind of comedy that is at stake. He may need all kinds of humor, the cheerful, the dark, and the introspective. He must master the entire range.

We see more clearly now why the two related phenomena, comedy and humor, do not run parallel to each other, but are arranged in series in such a way that all humor initially refers itself to existing comedy and cannot come to be without it. Comedy, for its part, calls upon humor and, so to speak, requires it as the adequate response of the subject.

The relation that emerges in this way is related to the foundation-relation; only that it does not primarily concern values, but simply the state of affairs, i.e., the state of the affairs in the object and in the reactive conduct of the subject.

The tie between the two reciprocal elements remains an entirely one-sided kind. For quite obviously, there is no necessity that a humorist take on some piece of comedy; he may be lacking (417) an adequate reaction to it, or a subject may fail to produce it. There may even be no receptive subject present, though all the conditions for comedy are there in the object. Then the reciprocal condition for the comical as aesthetic object that lies in the subject (as the third member) would of course be lacking; provided that is the case, we may say that then the comical does not occur at all as object.

The comical in the strict aesthetical sense can also not exist without the element of humor. It requires, like every aesthetic object, the reciprocal work of the subject. The subject must bring to it something quite definite; and, in this case, that consists not only in a high-spirited and easy-going attitude, but also in a sense of the comical itself. This latter, however, is in the normal case essentially identical with humor. We can sum up: without comedy in the object, no humor in its reception (or, even more, in its performance); but also without humor in the reception, no comedy in the object.

However, the second half of the last assertion is not quite correct. No doubt some response must be given by the subject reciprocal to the comical as aesthetic object, and no doubt it must consist in having the right sense of the comical; but it does not have necessarily to consist in “humor,” not, at least, when we take this concept of humor in its narrow and precise sense, in which there is also always an accompanying affirmative element that concerns the object. And this element could do the same reciprocal service as humor does, but in a different way.

In fact, there exist other ways to make effective use of the comical. They are related to humor in their openness to comedy, and in that respect, they are coordinated with it; but they are all very different from it, and in part, they are even contrary to it in their attitude toward the comical. Of these kinds, these are the most important:

1. The comical taken as empty amusement;
2. The joke – the use of the comical for the sake of a punch line;
3. Irony – the assertion of one’s own superiority by the apparent belittling of the self; denigration in the form of apparent appreciation;
4. Sarcasm – bitter, mocking, destructive denigration – in the form of exaggerated appreciation.

The two last, it is clear, are sharply opposed to humor. For humor always contains – even when it is “black” – something good-natured in it. Irony does not of course need to belittle its object bluntly, but it may easily do so precisely by means of that which gives it the aftertaste of delicacy and distinction: by means of the inclusion of one’s own self.

The same is true of the joke: as such, it does not have to be malicious, but it is not concerned with sparing people. Rather, it must intensify the comical element and to take care that the joke is on someone else. (418) Of course, the joke can only be on someone whose unintentional comedy is at stake. And, mutatis mutandis, the same must be said for taking “empty amusement” in the comical: it aims only at gaiety and merriment; it is indifferent to any injury it causes.

c) The ethos of laughter and its varieties

From the confrontation of these ways of appropriating the comical – specifically the joke and sarcasm – with humor, we can see clearly that an essential element of an ethos is everywhere involved, and that the opposition between them depends precisely upon it. It is not immediately obvious that an ethos of a certain kind lies at the foundation of humor. But one can exhibit and define it.

It is not a question here of a momentary stance or an attitude, as one might –or should – apply precisely in an individual case and for an individual object. A man’s sense of humor is a gift, which, as also with other talents, may develop at a given stage of maturation, and then be maintained at a certain level of consistency; it often accompanies its owner to the grave. No doubt, a man may also lose his sense of humor, but then only through the influence of traumas that may reorient his customary attitudes.

Humor is an affair of an ethos, conditioned by character and reflecting one’s entire picture of life; this ethos stands behind one’s sense of humor, and probably that sense was first provoked by the ethos. In any case, the ethos is what gives it the characteristic coloration of one’s benevolence and good humor. The ethos, which works here to give form and direction, is warmhearted, loving, placating, sympathetic, and, just for that reason, of a kind that is capable of seeing in the comical what is humanly touching and amiable.

One should not be put off by the fact that such an eminently ethical element works itself into what is otherwise a purely aesthetical relation. That is by no means a contradiction. We have seen sufficiently the extent to which moral values are foundational for aesthetic values (Chap. 28c), and this was traceable to the observer’s having his heart in the right place, that is, that he stood with his own feeling for values on the morally correct side. Otherwise, the aesthetic value would pass by him unnoticed.

Precisely this is the fundamental condition of humor: he who does not see the appealing and the amiable in the foolish and the fatuous, will also not know how to appropriate its comedy from the outside – just as is true of empty, transient states of amusement. Humor achieves something here that is quite different: it excavates and lifts into the light, along with the comical, something profound.

One can call in brief this ethos, as it is concealed in comedy, an “ethos of laughter,” although the term of course does not refer to laughter alone, but to what constitutes a man’s entire attitude towards life. But is the way one laughs not also always a genuine expression of an entire (419) attitude toward life? And in life do we not often hear within each kind of laughter an attitude of some sort? All the things that human laughter can reveal! One needs only to bring to mind concretely “how” some given person laughs, and then to ask oneself in all seriousness what that laughter tells us. People laugh as differently as they act, as they move, speak, and remain silent.

Humor runs parallel to other ways of appropriating the comical, i.e., to empty amusement, to the joke, to irony, and to sarcasm. It cannot therefore be true that only in itself, and not in these others, is found the “ethos of laughter.” Rather, there must always be an ethos present that determines one’s inward attitude toward the comical, and, along with that, transforms the comical itself. It must be present precisely where the situation is morally ambiguous or where, perhaps, it is repugnant.

In fact there is an ethos in each of these ways of appropriating the comical. In general, it may lie, essentially and lawfully, in the character of all forms of our sense of the comical, that a specific ethos stands behind it. In the majority of cases, the ethos is of a kind that rejects and condemns – just because comedy rests upon human weakness and smallness.

The negativity in the “ethos of laughter” is characteristic of the four forms we listed: laughter itself is in them all, and having fun and making fun of is a means of disapproval and only of disapproval, of looking-down-upon and of feeling oneself superior. It carries the mark of that “heartless delight” that we spoke of above. Of course that is the case for the four types in very different and very differently graduated ways.

It is not necessary to pursue any further the specific types of this loveless ethos. It is sufficient to have grasped its basic nature. It is especially marked in sarcasm, which manifests a strange unsparing attitude in a person who considers himself to be beyond all criticism. But even the “jesting” use of involuntary comedy is at bottom of the same kind. It is just not concerned with wounding and being “mentally destructive,” but only with the cheering effect it has. But since that effect succeeds more easily when there is less regard for the person caught with his pants down, the “joke,” too, has at least mediately the same tendency to “mental destruction.” And thus it can become, mediately, entirely malicious.

We see this in how the jokester goes about among men of a more harmless spirit. He pulls them along with him, and in that way seduces them to the same heartlessness as he; yet beyond a certain limit, he revolts people, because he does injury to their sense of justice. An uncorrupted moral sense rebels when it sees everyone laughing at the expense of one person.

The activity of the wit can reach a certain level of aesthetical genius, yet be at the same time morally questionable. This two-edged sword cannot be separated from pure “wit.” This lies in its nature, insofar as making use of the comical rests necessarily upon what is negative in human behavior, pettiness, weakness, (420) folly, and bad luck. The condition of humor renders it a bit milder. But then it is founded on a different ethos of laughter.

People enjoy listening to a witty man, but do not love him. For they feel, given their own weaknesses, that they are not given support by him, but rather are unmasked by his ethos. The clever man will take care not to reveal his nakedness too openly to him.

The implication of what we have just said for the artistic – especially literary –exploitation of the comical is that all comedy already stands upon an ethos of receptivity. That is a consequence of the threefold relation in the aesthetic object, i.e., from the contribution of the apprehending or receptive subject to the appearance-relation.

Up to now, we have spoken only of the comedy in life and of the inner attitude of the bystander observing it, “for” whom alone it exists. In the case of the writer, the relations becomes more significant, because he gives to his own ways of apprehension the form of an objectivation, and thereby lifts the comedy out of its transitory existence into a state of historical permanence as an appearing ideal quality. In that way, his action becomes morally an infinitely more responsible one.

For that reason, the “comic poet” who desires to be witty or merely sarcastic has never existed in a pure form. His heartlessness would cry out to heaven. In life, sarcasm usually blossoms; wit, too, is used as a spice for seasoning in a larger literary context; a forceful witticism in a dark mood serves as a relief, for it shakes off burdens and creates for a moment a light-hearted “ethos of laughter.” But whoever wishes to put together an entire book containing nothing by jokes will achieve the opposite: he will bore us. Boredom, however, is precisely what jokes are intended to stave off.

The true comical poet must have more than the art of amusing the reader, of irony, of wit, and of sarcasm: he must have humor. And that means that he must master a higher “ethos of laughter,” one that is not aimed at its target in a purely negative, loveless and heartless way, but which, out of the fullness of our common humanity, can feel solidarity even with the foolish and petty in human affairs, to which he knows how to give expression in rousing comedy that sweeps us all away.

Chapter 37: The Essence of Comedy

a) What is fallacious and what is serviceable in theories of comedy

We approached the problem of the comical from the ethical side, and came to understand it as conditioned by the psychic attitudes of people who have a sense of the comical, who enjoy it and respond to it inwardly. That was preliminary work; necessary work, to be sure, but work that simply prepares the way. What the comical is in itself could not be explicated in that way. What, then, is the comical? (421)

Given the previous discussions, to say what it is may not be quite as difficult as many artificially constructed theories make it seem. These theories tended to set the task at too great a distance, and for that reason they were forced into a much too pale and general schema. Nonetheless, concealed in these theories are important insights.

If in this way the theories have been reduced to a certain sweeping simplicity, they have on the other hand made life more difficult by demanding too much in the way of explanation, and have thus became complicated once again. This criticism is directed especially against the idealistic doctrines of Hegel’s followers, not so much against Hegel himself, who in regard to this problem generally failed entirely, but certainly against Weisse131, Ruge¹³², Vischer, et al. These all attempted to derive the comical from the presupposition of the “Idea” (of a Hegelian character), where the sublime is developed dialectically out of “conflict,” and then is led on to a “comical solution,” which, in a certain respect, is thought to be necessarily more complete of the two. The question of how much of this can be retained will not occupy us at the present time. The problem with which it was concerned was in the end a metaphysical (world-view) one, i.e., it was no longer purely aesthetical.

But what is important is precisely that the problem of the comical is in no way so deeply metaphysical, as, for example, that of the universal features of the beautiful; the latter is not entirely solvable, because it led to a final indissoluble element. The comical, however, is much more specific in nature: insofar as it belongs to beauty, a surd remains within it, but that is nothing new, and does not concern the peculiar nature of comedy.

In one respect, the situation with the comical is the same as with the sublime and the charming: with them, the special character of the genus can be identified with great rigor, and so too here. Then, too, the genus of the comical can be thoroughly analyzed precisely in the opposition of these two genera. We must only not place too great a weight upon it – the weight of theory and of a pretense to system, to a world-view.

Instead of over-complicated theories burdened by a pretense to a totalizing system, we shall allow the major theses of several less assuming doctrines to take the stand. They almost all concern the “definition” of the comical, but without always succeeding in their efforts to draw correctly the limits of this circle of phenomena. To correct this is in most instances quite easy. What is remarkable is that in many of its central issues all of the elements in the essential definition of the comical manifest a kind of congruence.

We can begin the series with Aristotle. His definition concerns, to be sure, only “comedy” as a genre, but it extends itself, as is quite natural, to all forms of the comical. According to him, comedy is the “representation of the weaker sides (in man)” . But this is not so for any given badness, but only for the ridiculous. What then is the ridiculous? He replies: (Poetics, 1449a 32 ff.). “The ridiculous is a certain lack and (422) ugliness, but of such a kind that it remains free of deep pain and ruin …”¹³³ may be translated as “weakness,” but it is definitely determined by the . In there is not necessarily an anticipation of aesthetical nuances; it is “ugliness” in its broad sense, the morally inferior, that for which a man is ashamed.

The “ridiculous” is thus given a moral basis by Aristotle – perhaps too narrowly, but it is accurately sketched within its primary domain, human “weakness.” Just as convincing is this limitation to the , etc., for the comical obviously ceases where real pain and bitter suffering begin.

In this ancient definition, something very important is lacking, the subjective reverse of the comical, the role of the subject sensitive to the comedy. It was a long time before anyone noticed this. The thought that something else is concealed in comedy, that it “deceives” us, so to speak, but then reveals the deception where we least suspected it to be, appears only in the modern era.

Hobbes expressed the idea as follows: comedy is the appearance of the unexpected, but tied to the feeling of one’s own superiority. Here the moral element is brought into the final clause and referred entirely to the perspective of the subject, a perspective that depreciates.

That is perhaps questionable, for it emphasizes heartless delight in a one-sided manner. Consciousness of one’s own superiority does not necessarily have to follow laughter over others’ weaknesses; where it does so, it no longer belongs to a genuine sense of the comical.

On the other hand, Hobbes gave an original formulation of a foundational element of comedy with his “appearance of the unexpected.” The expression is, however, too weak. The mere state of being unexpected is insufficient; rather what is unexpected must be precisely the weakness or smallness in human behavior (the ) in a place where we expected something of far more grandiose and heavy significance. The descent from an expected significance to its insignificance, if it catches us by surprise, and hits us in the face, is the comical.

Both elements in this specification of the nature of the comical have been appropriated by many, reworked and, in part, improved upon. Only the latter part of it has turned out to be truly significant: the “unexpected.” This idea, along with the Aristotelian definition – the and the – constitute the starting-point of all further formulations.

By the eighteenth century, those two elements of the comical became part of the vernacular. Wolff, Baumgarten, Eberhard¹³⁴, all understood the effect of contrast in the comical. Even the liberating effect of comedy (or of laughter) –from the bands of seriousness – was recognized in that era and articulated (Shaftesbury¹³⁵). (423)

Even the formulations of Kant strike us as the mature flowering of these reflections: “In everything that is to provoke a lively, uproarious laughter, there must be something nonsensical (in which, therefore, the understanding in itself can take no satisfaction). Laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.”¹³⁶

One might like to take what Kant says about laughter and carry it over to comedy itself. It is not the “affect” that is important, but the objective strangeness of the object, which is able first to call forth an “heightened expectation” and then surprise us by collapsing “into nothing.” Kant knew how to bring out in sharp relief that this, and nothing else, is the key here: “Note that it must not be transformed into the positive opposite of an expected object – for that is always something, and can often be distressing – but into nothing. For if in telling us a story someone arouses a great expectation and at its conclusion we immediately see its untruth, that is displeasing.”¹³⁷ What follows is the anecdote about the merchant whose wig turns grey when he learns of his financial losses (as a counter-example of a good joke).

The other element of comedy, represented in Aristotle by the , is found in Kant under the category of “nonsense.” That is clearly a broader motion, for it is not limited to the domain of the moral; the example of the wig shows that there exists comedy without moral weakness. Thus we will have to broaden the ancient formula. When the nonsense is resolved, we clearly sense relaxation in our laughter.

The theory of comedy has stayed within these limits. Jean Paul¹³⁸ saw in the comical a “lack of judgment beheld through the senses” – an “action that contradicts the situation of the actor.”¹³⁹ Schopenhauer is more rigorously Kantian: the comical is the sudden appearance of incongruence between what is expected and what comes to be – or between the concept and the real object, so far as the latter reveals itself as nothing. Here, too, the effect itself is the trailing-off into nothing. Schelling and Schleiermacher, two Romantics, made things too easy for themselves when they play off this contrast against the greatness of the idea and the nullity of the semblance. The element of self-resolution is more important, as Vischer and others emphasized. If what is nonsensical, cockeyed, or illogical were maintained, it would produce only confusion and annoyance; only when its contradictions resolve themselves is the tension eased, and this resolution, if it takes place suddenly, is felt as comedy. Eduard von Hartmann puts illogicality in place of weakness throughout (that is in conformity with Kant’s “nonsense,” but is rather too narrow). Volkelt¹⁴⁰ says that the mere semblance of value presents itself visibly in its own self-resolution. (424)

b) The types of nonsense in the ridiculous

At this point, we have assembled a collection of the essential elements of the comical. They were developed historically one after the other, but only in assembly do they result in a complete picture. They are: nonsense (the , weakness), the semblance of significance or importance (which must be there at least at the outset), the self-resolution of semblance (it vanishing into a nothingness), and the unexpected. These four elements are not always sharply distinguished; they flow into each other. They are well primed only for an artificially polished joke, which comedy can carry to extremes. For that reason, the joke also has a punch line, which a maladroit comedian may spoil.

Obviously, it cannot be allowed that the Aristotelian be limited exclusively to the “illogical” (as in E. v. Hartmann). It may be true that in all the little moral defects that the great majority of comedies – in life as in literature –offers us, there is an illogical element, but that alone does not make for comedy, for that alone does not make possible the effect of the transition to nothing. The Kantian expression is better, i.e., nonsense, which cannot be understood in a merely logical sense. What is then alone of importance is that the nonsensical remain concealed at first, so that it may, if only for a moment, take on the illusion of meaningfulness, and be able to convince us of it.

One finds this analysis confirmed for the entire series of content-phenomena that yield the material of comedy, i.e., in everything that has the character of . If one takes off from the obvious opposition of comedy and the sublime, it becomes clear that in the former we always are dealing with the small and petty in man, just as we deal with the overwhelmingly great in the latter. Instead of sublime excess, we encounter the deficiency of the ridiculous. But ridiculousness is not rooted in deficiency alone, but in the claim made by what is deficient to be in fact of a normal measure or even of an excessive one. And if comedy is to become vivid, the claim must first find a certain acceptance.

The phenomena of human life that fulfill these conditions can be divided into three groups.

The first group contains moral weakness and smallness that likes to parade itself as strength and human normalcy, and thus attempts to conceal itself, but it cannot prevent itself from betraying and thus completely unmasking itself. Of this kind are caprice, inconstancy, comfort, laziness, impatience, apprehensiveness and fearfulness, cowardice, taking fright, credulity and gullibility, lack of self-control, anger, blind rage; further, loquacity, love of gossip, pomposity, collusive-ness – but also real pettiness, pedantry, tight-fistedness and greed. In these latter, there are significant moral defects.

This list is of course incomplete. But one sees in these examples what kind of human weaknesses function in comedy. These are (425) – according to Aristotle –those weaknesses that represent human lapses, none of which are very serious and do not bring about moral decay with them; thus they are failings that are still barely compatible with a certain endearing quality in their bearers – and that, no doubt, to very varying degrees. In the case of pettiness and greed, the limit has already in fact been exceeded.

It is well known that these kinds of weaknesses offer an inexhaustible circle of themes for comedy – in life itself, as in poetry and storytelling. Yet when one asks why this is so, the reference to the is quite unsatisfactory.

What is genuinely comical about weaknesses lies in their tendency to mask themselves, and, where possible, to pose as their opposites. And the comical effect begins with the critical moment when the mask falls off, to the surprise of all, and the all-too-human is revealed in its nakedness.

Accordingly, laziness or the enjoyment of creature comforts is not comical itself, but surely become so when, behind a mask, empty fuss and bother are concealed, which were not seen through immediately. The case is similar when the weaknesses already manifest themselves openly, but then gravely offer deceptive reasons to justify themselves.

In the same way, gullibility is only comical just when it thinks itself to be merely very careful; a lack of self-control and anger, just when it thinks itself entirely justified, or wants others to think so; gossip is usually comical just when the gossiper thinks himself to be far superior to the chitchat of others; pomposity just when it believes in its presumed importance. … Only in these ways is the self-annulment of the nonsense in all of this an inner and necessary one, just as the changeover “to nothing.”

The second group has a strong component of intellectual defects, and is close to the element of illogicality found in nonsense. But here the weight lies upon the blindness of men to their own failings, or upon the tendency to conceal them.

In this group belong a careless unconcern for logic, stupidity and unreflec-tiveness, folly, prejudice and blindness; furthermore, always with a component of stupidity, are self-certainty, stubbornness, vanity, haughtiness, meddlesomeness; finally, the inflexible adherence to what is conventional – and, along with that, the entire objective sphere of conventionality, so far as it is obsolete, and suppresses what is justifiably natural; then, too, the artificial upholding of appearances (good manners) and, in general, of inauthentic moral tenets.

Many more things that bring out the comical in an especially graphic way might be added to this list, as, for example, foolish pride or foolish cleverness, the spouting of fixed opinions, the pompous wisdom of people who know nothing –moral defects with a component of absent intellectual power, which makes such inward nonsense especially apparent.

Here too, the most important thing is that something in the stupidity, in the lack of logic, etc. appears as wisdom and deep reflection. Then (426) simple stupidity is not what is comical, but only the kind that one can sympathetically understand and, within certain limits, go along with, or one in which one can empathize. Only from that position does the “changing into nothing” occur, which then produces the comical effect.

This is the reason why common stupidity is not so comical as one that is genuinely refined, that is, thought out in advance, of a kind requiring a certain amount of intelligence. It is especially noticeable in the case of folly, i.e., in that kind of stupidity in which after all reflection – perhaps quite carefully done –something central to the case is overlooked, though it is as clear as the nose on one’s face, especially when the case lies in the moral domain. The resolution of the nonsense in the course of events takes the form of realizing that one was “taken in,” which always is especially convincing, and which can be put to use artistically, because the very nature of coming to realize that one has been taken in is inherently “dramatic.”

Thus, the liar is taken for a ride when he does not think through the factual implications of his swindle; so too the deceiver or the sanctimonious person, and other phonies in comedy (Tartuffe). The unmasking of a villain is an inexhaustible theme for the ridiculous, especially when it is the result of some agent’s own innate absurdity, that is, when it leads to a self-resolution.

In this group, a special role is played by social conventions as well as by the tendency of men to hold to them as to a divine order of things. There is an entire world of illusion that is founded upon them: bogus virtue, bogus morals, bogus dignity, and bogus pride. Just where the genuine sources of our moral sense are dammed up – simple kindness, love, respect, forbearance – the forms of convention make the most space for themselves: ossified traditions, soulless ceremonies, false severity, zealous concern for social forms, heartless repression of the feelings of natural men (especially of youths).

In these cases, comedy lies neither in convention itself (etiquette), for there will always be such things, nor in their simple obsolescence, for then they would seem simply vulgar. It lies rather in the contrast that arises from simple and natural men assailing these things; all the more, when, with a stroke, the cloak of venerability is removed from the sacred rules and they reveal themselves as the work of narrow-minded men.

This phenomenon is closely related to the importunate demeanor of the man who would make the world a better place, although here we move in the reverse direction. The man who knows the better way desires to overthrow the world as it is, and considers all conventions obsolete; he believes that he is enlightened about what needs to be done. Such a man is always the newcomer to the domain he wishes to reform. His comedy is brought out most impressively where the way of the world itself, through the course of the smallest events (those lying in the “quiet corner”) leads him to absurdity.

The third group is the most harmless. The defect that lies within it is neither that of intelligence nor in morals – although the two may play a role – it concerns a man who is out of joint, who possesses some incapacity. There are many men of these kinds, and their absurdity most likely lies in the fact that a normal man has always to a certain extent a corrective (427) to them at hand: as homo sapiens he can compensate for them.

We must include here all kinds of clumsiness and helplessness in practical matters, beginning with simple stumbling and stuttering and proceeding to constant hard luck, and, as a consequence, missing out on some simple need, though it lies ready at hand; further, the external awkwardness in appearance, the lack of social forms, not because one rejects them, but simply because one does not know any better. Consequently, exaggerated shamefulness, embarrassment, bashfulness, but especially also the fear of others and the wish to avoid them, while also giving constant attention to the opinions of others; finally, a lack of presence of mind, absent-mindedness, daydreaming of nothing, distractedness and the lack of a proper mental discipline.

All that can be rediscovered in the types of comedy familiar the world over. These are the more harmless cases of comedy, although, of course, they are also the ones in which our laughter may easily become unjust. With certain forms of awkwardness a man can simply do nothing about them. Wilhelm Busch’s141 work is filled with such which can rise to the grotesque – and therefore he tries to shape the material of the episodes so that a moral light may shine out from them upon the misfortunes he depicts.

For that reason, the deceptive appearance of superiority distances itself from these kinds of comedy. Only a shadow of it remains in the ignorance of the comical character of the extent of his awkwardness. But that is sufficient to make possible the appearance of a punch line in the eventual turnabout.

c) The self-resolution of nonsense

Of the three elements of the comical, the first two have had their say, because the second, the “deceptive appearance of what is meaningful and important,” cannot be separated from the first one, “nonsense and human weakness.” For tied to every kind of human defect and nakedness is some specific accompanying way to conceal or to deny them, and these have their counterpart in in a vain sense of self, of conceit, etc. A third element is still lacking, the presence of which would allow a latent comedy to appear in full strength and establish its validity: the self-resolution of the nonsense.

Older theories held that it was acceptable to include the ugly among the other forms of nonsense that constitute the comic material. That was done basically for the sake of the theory – specifically, because the “system of the Spirit” had been so structured that anything of disvalue had to dispel itself and the world eventually to be “purged” of it, to which end the comical would provide the most potent means of such cleansing.

We purposely ignored this situation up to now. The ugly is a chapter itself in aesthetics, and has been touched upon in its place. The critical question is that of the modus deficiens in it. The ugly has only the one relation to the comical, that in it a discrepancy (428) exists, as it were, a kind of “absurdity,” for example, a disproportionality of face or figure. But this sort of nonsense does not have the capacity to dispel itself; indeed, it does not lie in its nature to reach a point of intensity by some misdirection of its self-awareness. Thus we cannot find in it a case of a turnabout into nothing; the fall lacks sufficient height. For that reason, the phenomenon of the ugly was left out here.

What is the nature of this self-resolution? Everything absurd in life avenges itself somehow in the passage of time. It does not do that because some universal mind rules over all events and balances them out, but because the chain of its causal consequences cannot be limited. It does not always have to avenge itself upon what caused it, or what was responsible for it; it can also meet with other possibilities. But it lies in the nature of transgressions of this kind, to which a bit of responsibility of one’s own is attached, that the “vengeance” indirectly and in its final effects falls to the guilty party. That is in itself a purely moral affair, to be sure, a quite serious one, often enough even tragic. It has nothing to do with comedy. To be sure, the mere self-resolution of an obligation, an absurdity, or a piece of nonsense is far from being something ridiculous.

What then makes it ridiculous? Usually, one at first answers the question as follows: it has the character of the trivial, small, or the meaningless within the three groups of the ridiculous, the . The vengeance of the universal course of events, too, is therewith swept into the domain of the trivial, and with that, revenge is no longer subject to the seriousness of the ethos in the hard, real world.

But that is insufficient. A lack of seriousness alone does not make for comedy. For that, a special kind of effect is required, one with which begins the self-destruction of nonsense, or the revenge of events. This effect occurs when the absurdity at first conceals its nature, and presents itself as something quite serious and rational, but then suddenly, by means of the weight of its own consequences, shows its true face. That is that we called the transformation or “turnabout to nothing” (with Kant), the coming to an end in nullity of an affair that seemed heavy with meaning. It may also be simply the lightning-fast revelation of the absurdity, and with that, the resolution of the nonsense.

In fact, older theories had maintained that in the comical something must always initially make an impression of greatness, yes, even of the sublime, and this greatness must then collapse into nothingness. That was the opinion of the Romantics, of Hegel and Vischer, and also for Schopenhauer and some of the later idealists.

But this schema is taken from a specific kind of comedy, from the “joke,” which no doubt depends upon an extreme augmentation of tension; here is the height of the fall the main thing. The more weighty the thing that is to fall “into nothingness,” the greater must be the comical effect: the “joke” needs a “steep drop.” Without one, we do not achieve the desired explosion at the end. For that reason, the “punch line” is so important for the joke that when it is lacking or is interrupted, the comical aspect is destroyed. That means that the joke (429) is spoiled when the self-resolution becomes visible even just a moment too early; it virtually depends upon a cue. To have an eye for it, and for the art of narrative that belongs to it, is a genuine artistic talent. There are many men who regularly spoil the point of a joke.

This relation, which defines the “joke,” cannot be generalized. The great majority of things comical need no massive support from the sublime. The comical does not always need the “parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus.”142 And if it is also true that from the sublime to the ridiculous is only one step, it is not true because this step is a condition of all things comical, and that all comedy requires that it be preceded by the sublime. Most comedy is of a far simpler kind.

There is, for example, the annoyance over a minor mishap, the dread of imagined danger, the uproar caused by some misunderstanding or by something missing, the joy in gossip, and one’s own even larger contribution to it, possibly even just as one expresses outrage over the gossip of others. Here we have no need of a prior “elevation” of some kind.

It is perhaps of greater foundational importance that honest good will can become ridiculous when it sallies forth with means that are entirely insufficient for its ends, or because of a naïve understanding of the good. The former we see in the case of the immature and inexperienced; the latter in the case of the unsophisticated idealist or weekend politician.

In this group, finally, belong the large number of persons whose otherwise moral good will is invaded by egotistical and well-calculated motives that are at first concealed from the willing and acting agent himself – that is, motives that he is, at least in part, not really conscious of, but motives that are in part also willfully concealed and even appear, as it were, masked before his own consciousness, although a dark awareness of them continues to exist. Thus there is a kind of self-deception for which one bears responsibility. The first kind occurs, for example, when one gives a gift to a person for whom one has good will, but where there is no lack of some calculation about the obligation caused to this person –for that reason, the giver may feel outrage at the person’s failure to be thankful for the gift. The latter case is with public “charity” that in reality is meant to serve one’s own standing in society.

In all these cases, one thing is characteristic: this comedy does not require a “steep drop,” for there is no explosive effect intended. There is of course the contrast between the spheres, the opposition of earnestness and nullity; yet, comedy occurs without such amplification and, especially, without assembling all its elements at some moment crucial to the “turnabout,” and thus also without any real “punch line.”

Just the annoyance expressed by a man trying to dress himself quickly as the button on his tie pops out is comical in itself. The contrast between the importance of what he is doing and the nullity of the object is also ridiculous without any amplification; and the self-resolution of the nonsense is sufficiently given in the uproar and despair of the victim – when the (430) time he has lost does not have fatal consequences. It is the same with the secret egotism of the calculating gift-giver, with the nervous impatience of a man who waits in vain, the quickly provoked jealousy of the man in love, the self-induced dread that torments a man awaiting an imagined calamity, the easily distracted prayer of the sanctimonious worshipper.

For this reason, the famous definitions of the comical, at the head of which stands the Kantian “turnabout to nothing,” does not have to be lowered in rank. It is only natural that the inner essence of a peculiar phenomenon will be first discovered in its most acute form. That has happened in these cases, for the form of real sharply-honed objective comedy is the “joke.”

Nonetheless, it would be an error to carry over this characteristic acute form to all remaining forms of the comical. The important thing, rather, is that there be a great many grades in the intensity of the tension and of height of the “drop” –one might describe it as the phenomenon of “contrast” – and that our emotional response to the ridiculous extends here into very mild mixed emotions.

We do not always need explosive effects, but not even acute tension. No doubt our human sense of comedy is similarly graduated in multifarious ways: a coarser man always first appreciates the coarse effects, to which belong many kinds of increase in the “drop” (artificially, if not otherwise); the man of greater nuance will, as a rule, prefer the quieter, more psychological, or more deeply hidden elements of the comedy.

The two genera of the comical that have often been noted correspond to this perfectly. The crude comedy, which quickly degenerates into the grotesque, burlesque or the spectacle; the finely wrought comedy, which – always in association with the charming – manifests the opposite tendency, i.e., to pass into the playful and the intellectual.

d) Superiority in humor

One need not alter any of the essential elements in the definition of the comical because of the above limitation. In reality, it is a question rather of the abrogation of a limiting condition, that is, of the expansion of the sphere of validity. Nonsense, apparent importance, and self-resolution, remain where they are. Apparent importance, however, can be put on a lower rung of the graduated scale in such a way that it is no longer felt as apparent. Nonetheless, something analogous to it must be left over, some presumptive weight, or at least the belief that it exists.

It is characteristic of humor – in life as in literature – that it does not, for the most part, move within artificially exaggerated oppositions, but holds more closely to life, and draws upon steeper drops only where they, as it were, offer themselves.

This coheres well with the inner nature of the eye that seeks out humor. This eye is not disapproving, cold, or loveless, as that of the (431) jokester, who welcomes every occasion to laugh when the joke is sufficiently potent. The eye of the humorist is fundamentally full of love and sympathy; he even shows favor to the human weaknesses he reveals. Therefore, he exaggerates neither the weaknesses themselves nor the contrast in which they appear. And before all else, he does not inflate a presumed “sublimity” as a background for these failings.

Comedy that is seen as humor is a milder comedy. Just for that reason, it speaks to a more refined audience. There exists in life a deep need for this kind of comedy among those who are always under stress and always earnest; it makes their hearts leap a bit, and loosens the tension they are under. That capacity has its basis in the peace and composure of the view of life that the genuine humorist brings to his work, and which, within certain limits, he also transmits to his readers.

This peace gives a man a certain distance from the eternal busyness of life. It cannot protect him from what fortune may confer upon him, but perhaps from the many little and petty events that, because of their great number, can seem to crush and overwhelm him. Humor has a beneficent effect on us, whose nullity might, as it were, be clearly demonstrated ad oculus [visually]. Despite its exposure of the small failings of men, humor is still the genuine benefactor of humankind.

No doubt the enjoyment of this beneficence is no longer a purely aesthetical enjoyment. We have here rather a moral consequence of the aesthetical phenomenon. In this way it also corresponds to a precondition of genuine humor, a condition that, even more than it, is rooted in an ethos.

For that reason the true humorist is superior in life, while the man without humor is his inferior. That does not refer in any way just to the peculiar gift of producing humor, which is, after all, not frequently encountered, but above all the sense of and receptivity to humor, the simple broad-mindedness and inward disengagement that everyone is capable of – if not at every moment and in every situation.

The sense of humor is a genuine aesthetical stance, but one always resting on an ethos. This ethos must, of course, be summoned up, must, as it were, be erected from within. For it signifies the overcoming of inhibitions, or at least the willingness to do so. Neither is self-evident. For everyone, in some areas of his life, has his own inhibitions – his own obstinacy, his pedantry, things that annoy him, or his conceits – and only through a genuine self-overcoming is a person able to break through them into laughter. If, in the humor placed before us by some humorist, quite different inhibitions than our own are at stake, still one’s own are really targeted also, for they are all far too similar to each other such that they all could not be uncloaked and exposed by one.

The humorless man – meaning the person who does not even have a passive sense of humor – is therefore a truly morally defective man; he is too inhibited even to want to free himself. At bottom (432) he can easily be taken as a man who, with some justification, fears humor, because he senses that it is directed at him. That means, in turn, that he thinks of himself as the butt of some comedy, or at least imagines himself as one of its targets.

The man without humor is, accordingly, himself a perfect representative of comedy. Inadvertently, he puts in the hand of the humorist the best example of it. For the aversion to humor is with such men identical to fearfully holding fast to gravity and dignity, behind whose deceitful appearance stands pure “nothingness.”

The test of the example of human superiority (the purely inward one, not that toward other men) has always been whether a man can laugh at himself or not, or, more innocuously, whether he can hear a jest aimed at himself or not. Not everyone has the taste for that, and most people cannot put up with it. For the ability to put up with such a thing does not consist simply in grinning and bearing.

These phenomena – together with their characteristic antitheses – were observed early on. They were noted by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. He sketches two types of [vices] in the deportment of men, between which an “unnamed” [virtue] lies. The is the jest, and the types of [habits] concern the attitudes of a man towards a jest he is told. At one extreme is the , the “rogue,” who makes everything he touches seem ridiculous and will allow no seriousness; at the other extreme is the , [boor] who understands no jesting and takes everything with bitter seriousness. The latter is obviously the humorless man, who immediately becomes furious at a joke aimed at him. If we also consult Theophrastus143 in this matter we realize that the ancients themselves saw this type as highly ridiculous. But that is precisely what we are concerned with here: he who cannot laugh along at human weaknesses, some of which are or come a bit close to one’s own, makes himself precisely into an object of comedy.

Chapter 38: The Comical and the Serious

a) Metaphysical aspects of comedy

In itself, comedy has not much to do with philosophical questions. Those stand closer to its antithesis, the sublime. So, at least, matters appear at first sight. But after more careful observation, the situation changes. The ethos alone, which determines the kind of sensibility required for comedy, points to its deeper roots. Apparently a man possessing humor must somehow have or secure a footing on a philosophical platform, even when the philosophy does not penetrate his objective consciousness. Those are facts that, with reference to certain forms of literature, can be demonstrated precisely. (433)

The distinction is well known between gentle and mordant satire.144 The opposed attitudes, one that affirms and one that condemns life, is hidden in them, one half optimistic, amused, enjoying itself, that “lives and lets live,” and the other markedly pessimistic and able to amplify itself to the point of bitterness towards life in general. The subtle humor of Horace’s¹⁴⁵ satires is a lovely exhibition of the first phenomenon. In the second genus, such high achievements are no doubt impossible, for the sought-after effects are of a coarser harshness, and the view of life that stands behind it is too negativistic.

Even when we omit reference to such markedly extreme cases, a certain philosophy of the world and of life always stands behind the eye for the comical. That means that this eye has a metaphysical background – no different from the sense for reverence and matters of faith, or for human love and human hatred. And, very often, the world-view that lies at its base is one and the same for all these domains – often even for that of knowledge. It does not have to be so, for the philosophical perspectives of a person are rarely thought through uniformly. But there is always a tendency towards such uniformity. For that reason, all sense of the comical, especially its deeper form, i.e., humor, always has a moral, metaphysical and – if you like – a religious side, too.

This is what we sense so strongly in the great humorists among the poets: Jean Paul, Raabe, Reuter146 , et al. They do not have to step out of their personae and demonstrate their view of the world to us; we receive it much more concretely and penetratingly from the way they see and give shape to the comedy in life.

There is an additional interconnection between metaphysics and comedy. It concerns specific characteristics in the structure of the world in which we live, so far as we are able to respond emotionally to the world-structure as comical. And it is understandable that men find such characteristics more readily where their own place in the world resides and their own integration into the great processes of the universe is at stake.

Many subtle metaphysicians have found tragedy in the place of humankind in the world, and given it a pessimistic expression. But such thinkers have also found comedy in the same role, and in both cases for almost the same reasons: for example, for the reason that men cannot help but seek their own “happiness” everywhere, but in so doing they discover malice in the constitution of their own nature and of the way of the world that builds barriers along the road to their happiness. Metaphysical theories of this kind are, for the most part, eudaimono-logical, ¹⁴⁷ and the fact of man’s eternal betrayal in the “balance-sheet of pleasure and pain” plays a determining role in them.

We know this from Schopenhauer, who, in the development of such theories, usually unfolds a grim humor. The entire state of the world – beginning with a “brutal will to create a world,” which produced an (434) intelligence that later “abrogated” it – seems like a huge joke.

Friedrich Schlegel introduced the joke into philosophy, but on a quite different basis. His procedure is related to the dialectic of Schelling and Hegel, for which the element of the turnabout is also the essential element. A trace of jesting can be heard in many of the clever and ingenious formulations in Hegel’s system.

One may also find essentially aesthetical forms with which to develop a metaphysics of the comical. In his day, Schelling had made progress in adapting the aesthetical attitude entirely to philosophy by making of it a universal organ of metaphysical knowledge. Only second-rate minds, however, considered this example worthy of imitation. But in aesthetics itself it found a few counterparts.

The Romantics found a profound irony in how man is thrust into the world, while in truth he stands behind it and plays a role in determining its nature. Man will never succeed, in their view, in rediscovering his own nature in a world that appears alien to him, and thus we have the tragicomedy of man failing to grasp his own nature in the nature of the world. Novalis went a step further with his “magical idealism”: this permits man to create a world according to his own wishes. He must have a magic wand, that is, he must control the “central organ,” just as the artist controls the senses: the painter takes control of the eyes, the musician of the ears.

An idea of St. Schütze¹⁴⁸ (Versuch einer Theorie des Komischen) seems a bit more specific. According to him, comedy is a game that nature plays with man all the while he thinks he acts freely; thus it is a game that nature plays with human freedom. This idea, which in itself is perfidious and truly satanic, is softened a bit by understanding it as claiming that comedy is at bottom only the “perception or representation” of such a game. However, this changes little regarding its tragicomical betrayal of man, with respect to his responsibility, accountability, human dignity and ethos, in a highly ridiculous and metaphysical way.

Others have praised this idea (Vischer), but it was clear that it is too narrow for a definition of the comical. Then, too, it is obvious that there are very many other things that are comical and comedies that are less harmful and have nothing to do with such a fundamental betrayal of man.

One great example of a metaphysics of man persists and takes on the form of a grandiose joke: man struggles to be honest and good, believes that he is guilty of every fault, blames himself and listens to his conscience, bears up under what he takes to be his guilt – and in fact it is not his guilt, but, without his knowing it is instead determined by a chain of causes that worked its way through him, and that is infinitely indifferent to good and evil. (435)

In this “comical” picture of the world, not only the person is degraded to the level of a mere thing, in fact to a mere plaything in an irrational game of an eternal mechanism, but also even the high aims that men honestly take to be their own are branded as mere nothings, and replaced by very banal motives of a petty, egotistical kind.

The case of metaphysical comedy, which is tied to all teleological world-views, is not much different. It becomes amplified where the world-view is openly anthropomorphic, or takes to itself only anthropomorphic characteristics. The first is the case where one catches sight of will and predestination in the world-process, the second where man stands before us as the highest meaning and purpose of the process, and everything appears to be directed towards him. The grotesque comedy here lies in man, who lovingly constructs this picture of the world – with the intention of structuring the world in a way that is especially favorable and lovely for himself – but who achieves precisely the opposite: he robs himself of the only dignified and meaningful station in the world.

How that happens is really a chapter in the book of metaphysics. But the essential thing is as follows. Man has his special place in the world, as possessing a “higher nature” in comparison to the animals, thanks to two higher gifts, the capacity for purposive action, and the capacity to decide matters by acts of free will. The person who assigns purposive activity to the entire world as a form of determinism denies and trifles away these two gifts. The first is denied, because man can realize his ends only through means (such as natural energy) that allow themselves to be harnessed without any resistance to his aims; but such neutral means can be found only in a world that is determined by mere causation, never in a world determined by final causes, in which every object brings with itself initially a “directedness toward something or other.” In that way, man injures himself, he makes out of his own active nature one that is condemned to passivity. The second gift, however, that of freedom, is trifled away because in a word determined by teleology there is no more latitude for “free” decisions. In such a world, even the decisions of man are predetermined, and his freedom is only an apparent one.

The “comedy of teleology” can be traced through the entire long history of human reflection and inquiry; in everyday life, in myth, in religious thought, in philosophy: almost all philosophical “systems” are indeed teleological. It seems as if some secret power has drawn men ever again to deceive themselves.

We see that what is at stake here is not only the “metaphysical aspects of comedy,” but rather the comical aspects of metaphysics, and with that also the comical aspects of all human world-views and philosophies of life, even when they strut themselves in the sublime robes of a “higher wisdom”: that is, we have at stake here the comical aspects of myth and religion. (436)

Everywhere that a heavenly realm constructed by man collapses, comedy becomes apparent, and scoffers collect about. But their scoffing is cheap, to be sure, and hardly worth our concern. As long as heaven endures, no one notices the comedy; men remain steadfast and reverential, and look upon it with awe. And just in their awe, they are metaphysically comical objects.

At the end, we might cap this off with the enormous self-deception of man regarding the problem of meaning. The situation is such that a world that was already filled with meaning would be a world unfavorable to meaningfulness for man as a being who bestows meaning; but the meaningless world in which we live is the only world appropriate to man and meaningful for him. And all the while man, blind to that fact since the beginning of history, denies it, and attempts to twist its meaning and make it “better” – that is, make the world precisely unfavorable to meaning. The comedy in this cannot be mistaken. But it approaches the level of tragicomedy.

b) Peripheral phenomena of comedy

At first sight, the question seems strange: are there phenomena at the limits of the comical – of a kind, for example, that we came to discover in the sublime and the charming? It would have to be a question of cases in which the comical, of its own accord, turned about into something opposed to it, thus most likely in the serious, or what one thinks it to be. The question is strange only because we know the comical itself as the product of a turnabout by the sublime. But not all comedy comes for the sublime, as has already become apparent. In the face of that fact, the situation changes.

There are various kinds of peripheral phenomena. We may anticipate one, for it concerns literature, especially, but also indirectly the conduct of the living humorous person, of the jokester, the scoffer, et al. For it lies in the nature of the comical that it resists a broad treatment of its material; it has an innate tendency to limit itself in time.

The reason for this lies in its structure: everything in it forces its way towards a “punch line” that cannot be drawn out to any length, because then the punch line would be guessed at from some other quarter. If the limit is exceeded, the comedy is exhausted also, for one cannot stay with it for any given amount of time. One cannot make the drop have its effect a second time after it is once used.

That is an essential difference from other literature. Of course, there exists the peripateia149 in every drama, in every well-constructed novel, usually even in the great epics, which, however, are not so mindful of it. But everywhere that serious matters are dealt with, the breadth of the material drawn into the narrative and dwelt upon is something positive and usually necessary; it transmits familiarity with a milieu. Only in comedy is the situation otherwise. Neither the preparatory tension nor the slow dissolution of the mood and the aesthetical pleasure it creates can be stretched out further here (437) than is required by the turnabout and its appreciation in the understanding of the audience. Just the slightest violation of this limit – even a felicitous word, if it is one word too many – will have a weakening effect, that is, it will destroy the comedic effect. All violent clinging to comedy that has already been enjoyed dissipates it.

For that reason, comical themes are short. They always maintain something of the anecdotal about them. They cannot fill an entire book, even when they are enigmatic and full of philosophical depth. When the humorist wants to fill a book, he must bring to it ever new comical elements. Since that would produce a monotonous babbling ad infinitum, the writer must concern himself with material of a different kind, about which the comedy may wind itself. That material may be quite earnest, and it must be so for the sake of the contrast (Fritz Reuter). The first phenomenon at the borders of the comical is not only a limitation of the temporal extension, but also the inner thematic possibilities of the comical.

There are other such peripheral phenomena. One that is well known lies in the comedy of invective, especially when, as in life, it carries a marked personal character. Invective, i.e., enjoying attacking others, occurs in every kind of persiflage, every riding roughshod over others that has the form of teasing and mocking. All persiflage has two sides: it is done by an attacker; it can be, for example, very clever, but it is also a challenge to the one attacked – perhaps for a similarly clever defense, perhaps for a good-willed laughing along with his own weaknesses. Both have their limits.

And these limits are genuine peripheral problems of the comical. For it can come to pass that the laughter of the uninvolved audience suddenly stops, and its attitude changes to disapproval, as when the persiflage has gone over into insult and genuine harm. The intellectually superior victim will not, of course, let the pain be noticed, but instead deflect it in such a way that he brings those who first laughed at him over to his side, and then he can withdraw to a good distance. But not everyone has the proper measure of superiority. And even when a person has it, the pain is still real.

This border phenomenon thus rests upon the fact that comedy has a destructive effect (you “die laughing”). The correct depth of what is drawn into the ridiculous must be considered. If one finds oneself at a great intellectual depth, the small pinpricks become serious insults, the “joke is over,” and laughter ceases.

This kind of peripheral phenomenon – the turnabout into offense – plays a broad role in life. This is so less because of the aggressive malice of the man with ready wit, and more because of the temptation that arises from the gift of ready wit and the rousing effect it has on others. The man who teases and jests becomes easily blind to those facts; the power of the jest draws him along and he notices only too late what damage he has done.

This peripheral phenomenon varies in manifold ways, but it rests always upon the same moral defect: the thoughtlessness, the careless play with the weaknesses of others. A species of this phenomenon is the joke that one allows oneself to play with wrongdoing. Depending on what way (438) we interpret the “wrongdoing” in question, the game can turn out badly for the object or for the player: the jester may create unforeseeable damage with his little joke, but he can himself fall into the gunpowder and be blasted in the air. An example of the first is found with Dostoyevsky’s Stavrogin [a character in The Possessed], who leads the Privy Counselor “by the nose,” without intending to cause any great harm.

The derailing of something funny is of a different kind; it is rooted in an excessive heaping of comedy. In such cases we have as yet no question of the phenomenon of the [buffoon], who draws everything into the domain of jest and thus creates silliness even where all is in earnest. Rather, there is a continuous poking-fun that, without disturbing what is important, at length becomes barren and tedious, because no one can go along forever with mere sharp wit, punch-lines and hilarity; after a while one demands greater sobriety.

Among the various peripheral phenomena of the comical and of humor – for the latter, too, can exceed its limits – this one is surely the strangest. For here amusements that are consciously pursued turn to boredom. It seems as though the real effect of comedy were tied to the Aristotelian [mean], such that a purely quantitative Too-much destroys it and lets it turn into its opposite, a Too-little.

Tediousness or boredom is in sharp opposition to comedy as, for example, the sublime or the tragic are contrary to it. For such opposition is entirely negative and contradictory. That conforms quite precisely to our experience: some tragedy in life is entirely compatible with the ridiculous; we know of it in tragicomedy, which often seizes us in life and pulls us in two directions. But boredom is not compatible with it: where boredom takes its place, laughter is dissipated quite differently than when it is dissipated by the approach of seriousness.

Still another border phenomenon is the turnabout of the comical into the banal, insipid, or tasteless. Of course, one may fall into banality from almost any material – for example, it is easy to do so from what is touching or painful – but the change is never as great as with the comical. Why is this so?

For this reason: the comical, when it is consciously apprehended and represented makes a claim to be clever and surprising, or at least entertaining, and when these claims are not met, the result is sobering. For the comical lives entirely from the satisfying of these claims, and nothing is left of it when it does not justify them.

When does the transition to the banal begin? Apparently when not only the intensification of the contrast – the punch line – fails to take place, but also when the contrast itself, which makes up the drop, disappears. In sum, it begins when the contrast turns out to be an inauthentic, artificial one, such that self-resolution is no longer possible at all, indeed when there was no nonsense present at all.

Does anyone doubt that such thing happen? Dilettantism in telling jokes, reciting stories and forced humor, which everywhere dominate (439) social entertainment, abounds everywhere. Think of how a successful joke immediately makes people want to try their hand at telling it – what constantly results in staleness, for the repetition of the same effect is impossible: the drop has been used up.

The same phenomenon can appear in a still more intensified form. Then jokes, comedy, and wit do not simply pass into the banal, but into the foolish and silly. That is, to be sure, no longer a real turnabout, because there was at the start no discernible level in the joke. This happens often when a man entirely without a sense of humor and with no gift for the comical wishes to tell striking jokes but then cannot summon up the slightest material for them. This is true also for children when they want to show how nicely they can do it.

Another peripheral or border phenomenon in this group is the well-known experience of how easily the punch line can be missing from a person’s attempts to tell of comical experiences, anecdotes or jokes. He who does not have the peculiar gift needed lacks it entirely, even when he tries hard to imitate a good model.

The teller of tales stands related in these cases to the inventor of the anecdote or to the experience, as the actor stands to the dramatist. He, too, must make his own contribution, that is, poetize. That is not something anyone is good at doing. Only seldom does a man understand this relationship; usually he throws himself into a task of which he is not capable. He “knows” not the whole of the task, and is amazed later on when he has failed to put the punch line across.

How is it that he ruins the punch line, when he himself, drawn along by the comedy, begins to laugh just an instant too early? Why does the genuine professional comic remain serious even in the midst of the most ridiculous comical situations and leave the laughter to the audience?

Because, to begin with, the point of the joke, the punch line, may not be revealed before it has achieved its effect, but must surprise the audience all by itself. That requires the narrator to master his tendency to laugh, but only “up to the punch line,” not beyond it. If the comedian remains serious even after the point is made, he must have done so for a different purpose. It might be that by remaining serious he continues to manifest the amazement of one who does not understand even after the moment when the audience has already grasped the point, and in that way he keeps before their minds a bit longer the height from which they have been dropped.

In the same direction we find still another peripheral problem of the comical that has been arrayed, so to speak, behind it. It arises when the comedian, suddenly distracted from the comedy he has in mind, is so shaken with laughter that he can no longer tell his joke. It may happen that he then begins again and again, but never comes beyond the specific point at which the laughter forced his recital to a halt.

What is especially odd is that in such a case the comedy leaps from the material, the joke or the anecdote, to the comedian: he becomes himself the object of comedy, and that in the strict sense of inadvertent comedy. This latter consists obviously in nothing more than the (440) elementary power of laughter, which impacts perforce upon both elements, the story and the teller, a power that in one way does not let a tale get told, and in another way does not let a tale be heard – so that the audience must, in the end, laugh over its incapacity to laugh along.

c) Tragicomedy in life and literature

Related to the border phenomena of comedy, but entirely different from them, is the connection to human fate and the serious, to what is genuinely tragic and tragicomical in human life. The latter should not be understood here as a dubious mixture of forms, as is occasionally produced by weaker poets, but primarily as a unity of the gripping and the ridiculous, as naturally occurs to us in life itself – just as they infect us all, without our knowledge, and also without anyone sensing the strangeness. This unity poses yet another problem.

This problem concerns the attachment of comedy to quite serious and important types of behavior, actions, entire groups of persons, and the course of their lives. They can also be attached to truly sublime figures and their destinies; that is the reason why it becomes so easy for the jester to “drag the sublime in the dust.”

But at this moment we are not concerned with this transition from the sublime to the ridiculous – nor with its reverse – but with an attachment and the mixture of forms, first in life, and then in literature. What is the situation here? Are not life and literature sharply distinct?

That is precisely what is striking here. Once the ancient world created separate forms of literature: the tragedy and the comedy, and, in a smaller format, the ode and the satire. For the most part, the art of literature has stood by these distinctions. In the face of this, the forms not aligned to them, such as the bourgeois drama, had to save a place for itself alongside serious works.

Such distinctions could not be transferred to life itself. Life gallops along counter to such attempts. But that means that life itself is simply not as these schemas would have it. There are no sharp distinctions in life; in it, everything is mixed up in scintillating disorder. Here the comical is really attached to the serious through all the pathways life takes, and it devotedly follows the serious everywhere. The most sublime hero has his all-too-human traits, the wisest of men his foolishness, the morally righteous and the man of disciplined self-control his weaknesses. There is no doubt that these contrasts are comical and challenge our sense of humor, but there is no doubt also that humor makes all great things small, and can even make it vanish. Indeed, the situation is that the danger of being brought low grows with the greatness of the great, the highness of the height, so that one is in the end forced, if one does not wish to abandon the sublime, to protect it from the ridiculous by creating an aesthetical distance from it. (441)

Here we have the true basis of the divisions in art. Art separated what it first found united because it did not know how to unite it.

The attachment of the two is still not a tragicomedy, for tragicomedies do not consist in the amalgamation of tragic and comical traits in man, but in a much more inward interweaving. Specifically, man can, by pure stupidity or other weaknesses that are laughable in themselves (conceit, arrogance, stubbornness, anxiousness) produce consequences whose serious and far-reaching implications stand in no relation to the triviality of his failings. Then his fate is truly tragic, but the consequences of the events remain infected with an irremediable comical element that lies in their disproportionality. Thus here the Aristotelian is suspended. That was intended precisely as a protective barrier for tragedy.

Thus we see that in genuine tragicomedy the tragic itself is also comical. And, indeed, it is tragic such that one cannot suspend the other, but both maintain themselves in an irritating identity. Naturally, these are different aspects of the same set of events, but they are not separable from each other. If art tried to separate them cleanly from each other, it would do injustice to both.

That is clearly reflected in literature: material for tragicomedy is rarely found there and it was always considered to be difficult to deal with. But there are examples in the high style: King Lear, who begins with immense stupidity by taking all of his power out of his hands, still allows himself to be led on by hypocritical assurances – the consequences are all unpredictable and genuinely tragic. How could Shakespeare risk so much in such a grand and sweeping play?

The answer may be: he could risk it because in the end life is such, and because he, the poet, could come closer to life than the poet of pure tragedy. Of course, not every poet can do that. He must have sufficient greatness for it, his inner eye must be far-seeing, and at the same time have the unity and power of synthesis, by means of which he can make lucid what appears to be oblique and patchy. But Shakespeare could risk his synthesis because in life ridiculous stupidities having tragic consequences are found everywhere and always. It is impossible to determine whether the Platonic insistence150 is aimed at achieving this task. But it is surely not by chance that, when his point is met it takes this form.

Moreover, the satisfaction of this requirement takes a double form in Shakespeare, for it also includes the comedy adhering to it that accompanies all seriousness in life. And therefore it has, to a great extent, become accepted in the art of modern literature. The profound comedy of Ulrik Brandel in [Ibsen’s] Rosmersholm is of this kind – so much so, that it throws significant spotlights on the main characters; similarly, the comedy of the polar opposites Eiferer Relling and Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck, or that of Tesman in Hedda Gabler. (442) There was a time in which we did not understand such a complexly woven, true-to-life comedy, for we would let nothing distract us from seriousness once we have turned our attention to it. This slowness to understand now belongs to the past, and the demand for an entirely uniform joyous or earnest mood throughout the entire work is now overcome at last.

Three hundred years ago the scenes with Falstaff in Henry IV may have led the way to this outcome – entirely without any tragicomical character, but simply as an accompanying comedy: one of a sort, to be sure, that finally came to dominate the entire great two-part work. Here is concealed the higher form of great poetry. And many kinds of such synthesis may still be possible.

Chapter 39: The Place of the Comical in the Order of Strata

a) The equilibrium of the outer and inner strata

In dealing with the problematic of the comical, it is best to follow the phenomenon for the time being just so far as one can, and only then turn to the systematic study of the basic questions of aesthetics. That procedure is conditioned by the state of the problem, in which many theories are in part in agreement with each other and in part in conflict, while the stock of the relevant phenomena still lack adequate discussion and description. Several of these theories were touched upon above; not much was achieved by those discussions – beyond an account of the goods they have common, in the middle of which stands the Kantian thesis of the nature of the ridiculous. Now it is time to turn again to the basic problem. That can be done in strict analogy to its treatment in connection with the sublime and the charming.

The basic systematic question concerning the comical concerns the strata of the aesthetic object in which it has its proper home. This was the way the question was expressed in the case of the sublime and the charming; in fact, that was true even for the general problematic of the beautiful, which, in the essentials, extended to the relations of stratification and appearance.

Can we now expect that a definite level, at least on the average, will be found for the comical within the series of strata? The sublime was rooted in the inner strata, corresponding to its relative importance; the charming and the values related to it were rooted in the outer strata, as is appropriate for its flighty lightness. What is left for the comical?

At first one might think of the outer strata, even more than in the case of the charming. For a certain lightness is peculiar to comedy, too, a lightness flighty and playful, indeed almost irresponsible. Such things do not easily take root in the deeper strata of an object.

But, on the other hand, one sees that, alongside of light humor there exists also a kind that is profound and even philosophical, and that comedy in general (443) – even the mordant and malicious kind – can sally forth into considerably deeper regions of human life, as it can also seriously wound and destroy.

In that respect, comedy is in no way related to charm, which is always harmless and never forces what is buried out into the light. There is also never the appearance of the alluring that is related to or corresponds to tragicomedy. The alluring is always attached to the surface, close to the senses, and marks itself directly upon them. Even the claim to wittiness is far from it.

One might accordingly expect that comedy would not be tied to the strata of the aesthetic object, but should be rooted at random, according to the ethos it rests upon, and lie sometimes close to the surface and sometimes deeper. To a certain extent, that may well be the case. We see this from the highly diverse nature of humor, the satire most assuredly, and from the comic drama. But the mere diversity of the level of height cannot constitute the nature of the thing. This is true conditionally for the charming, also, which, after all, manifests considerable latitude in its nature. We must therefore look about us here for some additional information.

The integration of the comical into the ordered series of strata of the object ought to be conceived in the following way. The comic can, in conformity to its nature, be tied neither to the inner strata alone nor to the outer strata alone, but only in a relation between the former and the latter. Then the gradient of the contrast, with which the comical deals, is always fundamentally situated between the important and the frivolous, the depths and the surfaces, the weighty and the trivial.

Let us remember that the “drop” was produced from the kind of nonsense that reaches a self-resolution in the comic effect. What is comical is not simply the resolution of any nonsense at all, but only of that kind in which there is pretense to something important but behind which stands something frivolous, so that in the unexpected resolution the former collapses “into nothing.”

Now one cannot, of course characterize the outer strata of an object – a work of literature, perhaps – in any way as a “nullity”; and then too not everything in the inner strata can be characterized as “important.” But that is not what is intended. Yet the relation might very well be of such a kind that, when something really meaningful and weighty arises, if it does at all, it can spread itself out only among the inner strata, and that similarly a relative nullity can come into its own only in the outer strata. Whatever is close to the surface of a literary work, the movement and gestures of the characters, and in part even the situation and plot, stands quite close to the senses; in it, perception prevails entirely. For that reason, things that have little significance can take hold here. It is precisely the opposite with what is meaningful and important. They can have their place only where there is some latitude for things of importance, that is, where the inner nature of the plot leads us into the attitudes and character of the persons in the work, or where (444) the larger interconnections of life are linked and integrated, which we then experience as the destinies of men.

That is why the “drop” in comedy cannot play a role in just any dimension, but must function as the difference in depth in the series of strata in the aesthetic object. Therefore, in the domain of the comical there is an unambiguous preponderance of individual strata or groups of them: no preponderance of the inner strata exists, as with the sublime, and no preponderance of the outer strata, as in the charming. Rather what dominates here is a certain equilibrium of the groups of strata. Strangely enough, the comical, in this respect, stands closer to beauty in general than does the sublime or the charming.

Of course here the situation is quite different from what, in the fundamental relation of the strata, constitutes the beautiful. For in that case it is the transparency of the stratum that stands in front for the one behind it, the simple and clear appearance-relation, that brings about the beautiful.

In comedy, the relation of the strata to each other is more complicated. For there the audience is first led astray and fooled; this happens when something greater and more important, which therefore would have to belong to a deeper stratum, is merely simulated, just in order to dissolve it into something far more shallow and meaningless, i.e., something in the stratification that is far closer to the foreground.

That means that in the place of the simple transparency in at least one of the outer strata deceitful transparency is introduced: precisely by means of it, the thing that is “greater and more important” is simulated so that for a moment a thing of that order “seems to appear” but does not actually “appear.” This half-nonsensical phrase expresses with wonderful clarity the misunderstanding that introduces itself into the lucid beauty of the appearance-relation and then obviously disturbs it.

Of course, it does not remain a disturbance. That alone would not be comical; it would be “mere deception” and quite possibly be ugly. Comedy arises in the removal of deception, when we see through it and recognize it as smoke and mirrors, humbug, a trick that was played on us, so to speak. Then begins the “disintegration to nothing.”

We should not find the talk about “seeming appearance” irritating. The expression is no tautology; appearance is far from seeming. The usual appearance in the relation of strata is the proper one: nothing is simulated in it, not even the reality of what appears. In the “seeming of appearance,” however, something is simulated, indeed just that which should usually appear, i.e., which should really be present and intended in the deeper stratum. But it is not that at all.

The deception itself depends upon the fact that the transparency is hampered, or blurred, or made difficult in the same way as often happens in life: life shapes its ever new comedy by the pretense to something important and meaningful, while in reality – and in this case, in real reality – a nullity (445) is made to seem great. To see through that pretense is difficult to do with a hasty glance, in life as in an artificially made-up joke, or as in the course of situations in good comedy, and the like. At first there appears, in both life and art, something great, which is then allowed to fall apart into something very small and shallow. All of the humorist’s consciously-made comedy is entirely an imitation of the characteristic deceptions that we are subject to in life, whether these be tricks pulled on us – by men who wish to fool us – or imposed by chance, such that we fall victim to them by our own inattention. Here we find the reason why, turning the matter about, the myriad small deceptions in life seem to us to be an intriguing game that is being played with us, whether by some diabolical and malicious being, or by a roguishly grinning divinity who wants to amuse us and himself.

b) Comedy and the true-to-life

From this perspective, it is understandable why comedy in literature is an excellent form of expression of the true-to-life. There are so many things in life that are hard to put in words, and impossible to say nicely or to depict. And yet there is a literary necessity of taking hold of these things, of representing them in a penetrating way; for they belong to the whole of life, and their absence would mean being false to what life truly is. What direct representation cannot achieve, indirect representation can, specifically comedy, especially in the mature forms of humor.

What does literature do, in fact, when it takes hold of the picayune and insignificant, the homely, the pitiful, and the miserable? Does it try to beautify them, or change their colors? Does it try to disguise them, to camouflage and conceal them? If it did, it could not bring them before our eyes. No, art proceeds quite otherwise.

All embellishing is untrue to life. Nothing is at a greater distance from art than a conflict with truth. Comedy almost lives from the surprises with which hard, real life assaults us – it lives, if we may, upon “improbabilities,” that is, from what to an unsuspecting idealist seems unbelievable, for the improbable is far from always being false.

Here we come immediately upon one of the secrets of comedy. It concerns its connection to the claim to truth in literature. It is precisely comedy, which regularly works with small exaggerations and thus cannot offer a purely faithful picture of real life, that is in a position to show us certain features of human life with amazing objectivity and ruthlessness, without confronting us with an image that affirms what is unbearable, the wretched and the miserable in man. We need not repeat the specific features that are at stake. Here belongs everything about weakness and foolishness that (446) was listed above (Chap. 37b), all the kinds of nonsense the can be imagined. For they all have, when observed in their nakedness, something in them of our notion of wretchedness and misery.

That is what literature brings into being when its humor takes up the all-too-human: it presents nonsense in the manner in which it would like to conceal itself in life – as good sense, importance, or at least as decent – but comedy does not then leave it tricked out like that, but leaves in such a state as to pull the mask from it, as occasionally occurs in life itself. But here the writer decides how to let the mask fall, such that the effect of the undoing will have the greatest value.

It is easy to see what is achieved in this way: the wretched and the miserable appear indirectly not in the unpleasant drawing-out of details, as full disclosure would demand, but only in their negativity, in making sensible their nullity.

And so the astonishing happens: the nullity, even the wretchedness, rises in the nexus of aesthetic values to a certain level of significance that the nexus of ethical values could never have, and which, in the moral context, would be a world inverted. Here, in contrast, nothing about it is inverted. For its significance is rooted in the fact that the nullity and the nonsense in man is just the folly upon which appears what is genuine and worthy in man. That is what comedy demonstrates in the greatest concrete palpability: in laughter, man lifts himself over nullity and lets it disappear into its own nothingness.

That is possible only because it is a question here of the appearance-relation, because what is low and repugnant has no actuality, thus neither too has the rejection of the repugnant; and the detesting of what is detestable is also no real shrinking away from it. Knowledge of unreality is essential to the entire state of affairs. That means: it is essential that here, too, as in the entire appearance-relation, no reality is simulated. What appears can be taken with amusement and a light heart.

The situation in the dramatic arts is similar: only because onstage intrigue and murder are not felt to be real can the audience have a relaxed attitude while enjoying them. Otherwise, such attitudes would be impossible. And similarly in comedy: only because the disgusting and the nonsensical are unreal can the hearer simply enjoy them. If it were something that we really meet with in life, the demand upon our sensibility would be greater; a person taking a correct moral attitude will at least be reminded by what he sees of its serious aspect. When he is forcefully reminded, comedy passes into tragicomedy. Experience teaches us how ubiquitous the latter is in life.

Beyond its significant function of upholding cheerfulness and a good mood and not allowing man to sink into his everyday misery, comedy is given a special task within literature – and not, as one may think, in “comic” literature, but (447) rather in serious literature. This function concerns the claim of literature to be true to life.

The great forms of literature, especially the novel, but also plays and the minor forms of the short story, have a great need to be true to life. We are sensible of it in nothing less than the requirement for “closeness to life.” This requirement cannot always be met by means of direct description, because that would result in an unpleasant or painful dwelling upon the lower things in life, upon wretchedness or upon irritating annoyances. There are poets who, in the end, become unbearable even to hard-boiled readers, because they go too far in the direction of such misery. But since serious writing cannot always stop short before these limits, but must foray into the land of unpleasantness, it is very much in keeping with our current concern to examine how it masters this effort.

Here we find the most splendid means of humor, that is, a comedy that rests upon an ethos that is affirmative and sympathetic. For it is a unique feature of comedy that, corresponding to its material, it deals precisely with the same weaknesses, pettiness, nonsense, stupidity, even the same wretchedness and misery in man and his life, about which we feel a heightened need for being true to life.

All these things can be offered with a touch of the comical without their harshness being thereby diminished in any way. However, the limits to which they can be taken are considerably extended by the comical. Humor takes from unpleasantness all that is bitter and tormenting; at the same time, it elevates us over what it reveals; laughter itself – even when it quietly rings out inwardly – is already an elevation above unpleasantness.

This we see confirmed by very great styles of literature, where writers digging into the depths of humanity are masters of humor. Thus Hamsun (e.g., in Rosa [German edition, 1909], the story with a bathtub; and again with all that happens around the title character in August [August Weltumsegler, 1930]); similarly in Ibsen’s dramas (Stockman [The Enemy of the People, 1883] Hjalmar [The Wild Duck, 1884]). It is not by chance that such things occur in writers who are not at all humorists proper. In their cases, they place weight upon quite different sorts of things, and not seldom upon precisely what is tragic. That causes no problems at all.

c) Implications drawn from the placement in the stratification

Further consequences may be drawn from the place of the comical in the structure of the strata of the object. To what extent our most recent reflections are in themselves such consequences has not yet been adequately discussed. The question can be made clear in the following way.

What was said about the place of the comical in the structure of the strata of the object has proven true. It is not a question here of the absolute depth (the depth of the strata) of the comical – and, since the comical has two components, – neither of the depth of the simulated meaningfulness, nor of the meaninglessness that is concealed behind it, but exclusively of the (448) difference in depth of the two elements within the series of strata in the object.

With respect to the material, a distance in height corresponds to the difference in depth, whether it is an ontic one, a merely logical one, or a moral one. In the last instance, it is always also a distance of the height of values – and, specifically, not the distance within the value/disvalue dimension, but within the order of relative height of values.

In these differences in height is the play of the “drop” constituting the comical. For it is immediately clear why the drop depends upon the degree of distance alone and not upon the absolute height. We are directly sensible of how the effect of in the successful telling of a joke, for example – is tied only to the size of the “falling apart into nothing,” while the content of the joke can be very different in the gravity of its meaning.

That is the reason why comedy can apply itself to any given contents as a kind of making-visible, without making any assumptions that a certain relative niveau is normal for comedy. Its condition is simply that its content (material) has some place for comedy to gain a footing, regardless of its “height” – in the kind of some nonsense, some weakness, or some folly. For all those things are found on many different vertical levels. The self-torment of the jealous man plays out on a different psychic level than, for example, the fear of scandal in a man in some position of prominence. Genuine humor rules over all ports of entry. We have seen, after all, that humor does not even stop short before the greatest philosophical material.

We see where the consequences derived from the place of the comic in the order of strata lead us. Since significance and depth are only illusory, it follows that when the illusion falls away, its opposite, the nullity, comes in to the light and must “appear.” As this is negative, it is subject to dismissal in the form of absurdity. It “falls apart” – compared to the thing of importance that was first simulated (the deeper in the series of strata), and with that it arrives at is rightful place, i.e., at is proper stratum.

The latter is primarily an effect of closure. Until it is reached, the most paradoxical stages are passed through; and, strangely enough, precisely the truth-value of the comic effect depends upon them. That consists in the closeness to reality of the unreal element or – what is the same – in the true-to-life quality of what is purely invented, the product of fantasy.

This relation is erected just upon the ponderousness in what is flighty and non-committal; or, in other words, upon the surprise of earnestness in a mere joke. For this earnestness ambushes us, unexpectedly, just as much as the sudden collapse of the weighty in the comic effect.

In addition to all that, there is also the purely representational value of the comical, the making bearable of the unbearable, or, if we state it simply and bluntly, the winning of charm by that which was entirely without charm and averse to charm. There is no time to be lost here on formulations, and the limits to which one can take paradoxes in the comical may still be debatable. (449) But the principle according to which the difference in depth of the thing of importance and the nullity operate in the comic is throughout the same: the crashing to the ground and the self-resolution of nonsense.

Thus one can also speak here of the “meaningful in the meaningless” The expression is perhaps the most universal. Or of “appearance in disappearance.” Both need some explanation. In the first place, comedy is the reverse: as the self-resolution makes the meaningful disappear and, in its place, something entirely meaningless appears, one might rather say that the “meaningless emerges in the meaningful” and the “disappearance remains in appearing.”

The relation is just not so simple; at least, it is a double relation. How does it stand with the nonsensical or malformed in the appearance-relation of comedy? Such things in fact disappear in comedy by becoming visible precisely behind the thing thought to be meaningful, and, with that, annuls it: in the process, it dwindles away, because its appearance in its nullity is at the same time its annihilation. Thus it annuls itself by coming into appearance. That means, however, that something else appears instead, so that in its final effect is still once again an “appearance in disappearance.” Accordingly, this whole double relation is then the “meaningful” that appears in what is “devoid of meaning.”

No doubt words express this too weakly. We can better make the idea come to a head dialectically. We should not consider doing that, however, because artificial conceptual forms can be dangerous. We must also be careful with comparisons. One must therefore limit oneself to descriptions in very imperfect concepts –in concepts that were not at all coined for this relation, and could therefore never correctly apply to it.

In the end, what may be said by means of these concepts is limited, despite diverse expressions of it, to this small outcome: the deeper does not appear in the more shallow, as is otherwise always the case and is the normal relationship in beauty; rather the shallow appears in the deeper. Nullity peers out from behind the meaningful, the ridiculous from behind the sublime: that is the perversion of the appearance-relation. But as it was not the first, so does it not remain the last.

Specifically, the deeper appeared first; it was dissimulated, but since only the surface was given, the deeper could appear only “in” the surface. Of this, of course, the receptive subject knew nothing. But if the first appearance-relation then turns about into the second, and the second (the perverted one) has had its effect, then the disappearance of the more shallow element begins – its re-disappearance, after it first showed up in the second relation – yet it no longer disappears behind the deeper element, because this has itself disappeared, but rather disappears behind its own absurdity. Expressed objectively: behind its own presumption that it was the deeper element. (450)

Chapter 40: Reservations and Objections

a) Pleasure taken in the comic and pleasure taken in beauty

The study of the comical is not itself something comical. Whoever wishes to amuse himself with it, will not get his money’s worth. So also the study of the sublime was not sublime, that of the charming was not charming. And so is the entire study of the beautiful – not beautiful; no one who wants to deal with beauty itself would undertake aesthetics. But a person concerned with knowledge will undertake studies of beauty, of the sublime, of the charming and the comical. It is the fate of aesthetics to disappoint. For all those who come to its study, come for the sake of beauty, and of the sublime, the charming, and the comic.

In this respect, aesthetics is differently situated from all other philosophical disciplines. Ethics helps the progress of him who struggles after the moral good, its puzzling questions concern in part very serious perplexities in practical life itself; to see clearly is to show the way. Logic protects a thinker from certain dangerous errors in thought; theory of knowledge renders us the limits and conditions of possible knowledge. On the higher levels of knowledge, it has a determining force. Finally, ontology gives a means of entry to those who desire to grasp that which exists; philosophy of history and philosophy of law serve indirectly our knowledge of history and law.

The special status of aesthetics in this respect constitutes one of its difficulties. The peculiarity of its problematic is such that precisely in the domain of comedy this special status appears to us most powerfully. Comedy is in fact that domain of beauty upon which the character of beauty withdraws to its greatest distance – so far, that it often seems questionable whether one may count it as a kind of beauty or not. For there are kinds of beauty that are unquestionably disturbed when comedy appears in them.

Now that is a perverse objection. If there are different kinds of beauty, they may each exclude the others, as the species of a genus exclude each other. And in the case of such objections, one naturally thinks at first of the sublime – or of such cases of beauty that are close to it. One does not have to look far for examples of this; for upon every face that beams with earnest, thoughtful beauty, this is true, and true also for every landscape that opens out to us from a great distance. But even without sublimity, that same effect is valid – charm, too, allure, loveliness –all are disturbed by any aftertaste of comedy.

What, then, does it mean that in comedy the character of the beautiful withdraws the most? For clearly it cannot mean simply a disappearance of beauty. For that, the pleasure we take in comedy is too closely related to the pleasure taken in beauty. (451)

But is this not pleasure of an entirely different kind? What do pleasure taken in the comical and pleasure taken in beauty have in common? This, surely, that both are purely objective, disinterested enjoyments of appearance, without concern for reality.

And what is the difference? People have always pointed to the fact that watching a comedy begins with displeasure: no one can take pleasure in nonsense as such, in folly or weakness. But that is never asserted. Pleasure in the amusement one gets from the comical does not depend on the nonsense, but rather on its unmasking, which is both its resolution and annihilation. The richness of meaning contained in the resolution of the nonsense is without question something positive – even more when the resolution is a consequence of its own nonsensicality – upon which pleasure may take on the form of a lengthy enjoying. We are familiar with this latter in the thorough enjoyment of a good joke, of a humorous twist, a funny picture, or even of an analogy that throws an oblique light upon its object.

The difference in our feeling of pleasure in the comic and in a neutral beauty is thus no larger than it must be for the peculiar kind of a special case. Seen subjectively, the difference is for the most part most likely one of mood, for the ridiculous is simply exhilarating, but in the other realm of beauty there are much more serious matters.

We have therefore no reason to draw a line of separation here. The comical can be integrated quite naturally into the beautiful; it can, as a paradox, easily possess something additional that is “elegant,” which then is directly felt as beauty – the art of a humorist of genius – as, on the other hand, the humorous can be tied effortlessly to the charming – resulting in unique creations of higher comedy.

We may still ask about the meaning of the withdrawal of beauty in the comical. To this the results of the previous chapter (39b, c) may respond: the peculiar power of the comical to communicate the distasteful and the low in a fully true-to-life manner, without giving offense or lowering our feelings.

“What” in fact comedy communicates here – seen purely in terms of its material content – is far from being something beautiful. Rather, one may characterize it as ugly. It was already shown why in the end “ugly” does not quite fit the phenomenon: it is a question precisely of the weak and low, the common and the nonsensical in men; of that from which we avert our eyes when we encounter it in life.

Why these weaknesses form the substance of comedy has been shown in detail. Now we must simply draw the further consequence that these material elements constitute what in comedy stands opposed to beauty: just that which “lets the beauty in comedy withdraw.”

But is this expressed correctly? Is it really so that in the comical alone the material determines beauty or ugliness, while everywhere else the decisive element is the bestowal of form? – regardless of whether it is either a question of the particular bestowal of form in a single stratum of the work of art, thus in (452) extreme cases of the pure play with form, or of the transparency of the forms in the series of strata?

Naturally that cannot be the settled doctrine. Being beautiful depends, here as everywhere, upon form; and certainly not upon the playful blossoming of form but rather upon its capacity to let some other thing appear. And for that reason, aesthetical pleasure in the comical – that which makes us laugh – is in the end of the same type as the pleasure taken in all other enjoyments of beauty.

The unique feature that characterizes pleasure – just that which makes us laugh – remains entirely within the genus of aesthetical pleasure: it does not limit itself to the content. For the fact that some effect takes place, and that the effect depends upon the simulation of something weighty and then upon the collapse of this heavy weightiness into nothing at all, are elements that all lie within the same appearance-relation. However, they make this relation more complicated; they first make it seem as if it were running counter to itself (perverted appearance), and then again turning about and returning to its natural direction. A peculiar pleasure is tied to this process, a pleasure that has no longer to do with the material, and also does not owe its peculiar nature to it: the enjoyment of comedy.

b) Comedy in painting and music

What has just been said shows that it is worthwhile pursuing whatever reservations may occur to us. There are still others, especially when one considers special cases. Up to now, we have spoken only of the comical in literature and in life, and both quite justifiably, because there we find the real weight of the comical. But it is true that comedy is also found elsewhere. How does it stand, for example, with comedy in caricature? In such a case, we must understand this phenomenon very broadly, and incorporate in our study everything that bears a trace of its character.

Do the above characterizations of the comical apply also to comic illustration? For we are concerned here only with line drawings; color is only a supplementation, almost a softening of comic effect. Perhaps, too, color would make a caricature too realistic. And the effect of that might be unbearable.

Now the question of whether the characterizations rightly apply to caricature asks whether the necessary “contrast” obtains, whether it lies in the correct dimension, whether here something “collapses” that first seemed great and worthy, and even whether we have some nonsense here that annuls itself.

The reservations concern the two last questions. One can, of course, find the contrast just in a clever caricature – but only when one is familiar with the object of the caricature. For this is the worthy personage; the figure distorted in the distortions is the nullity into which he falls. In that way, the correct dimension of the opposition has been secured.

But what about the “collapse”? The drawing knows no “earlier” and “later”; everything is taken in at once. One may nonetheless say (453) that it is so artistically designed that the observer at first recognizes the original in certain of his characteristic features and only then becomes aware of the distortions; these then produce the collapse of the important figure into a nullity. The “nonsense” would then consist in the pretensions of a person who, because of the distortions, has become a puny being, but one who wants to have as much great dignity as the original.

That is not applicable to all cases of caricature. There is also the series in reverse. In this case, we see first the distorted image, and experience it as provocative in its bizarre way; but just then, and despite that, we notice the figure of whom the whole work is supposed to remind us. And it cannot be denied that caricature this way around affects us approximately in the same comic way.

One cannot do otherwise than draw this conclusion from our analysis: the comic effect is indifferent to the order of events in its perception. But is it still possible to retain the “collapse” and the self-resolution of the conflict?

We may respond affirmatively. The “collapse” does not necessarily have to be a temporal one. We saw this above in certain forms of humor, where a simple comparison or an immediately perceived analogy may have in itself the effect of ridiculousness. One can, however, explain this phenomenon in a different way.

Specifically, the “collapse” may very well be experienced and appreciated later on and its comedy enjoyed only then. We are placed before the ruins of the broken idol and we still recognize quite well in the shattered form how great and formidable he must have appeared upon his pedestal.

Or, later on, the familiar picture of the undistorted original leaps before us. Then the contrast is the same as in the reverse series. In a like way, the nonsense is the same, and, a fortiori, its self-resolution, which consists in the disappearance of the false pretense.

A further question concerns the comical in music. It was shown above why pure music is not capable of the comical. How is this consistent with the fact that in program music, comedy can easily find room for itself? There must be at least the possibility of a musical accompaniment that corresponds to the comedy given in the text or on the stage.

We must admit that certain works of music come very close to comedy. Music is capable of brightness and gaiety, likewise of drollery, capriciousness, light-footedness, volatility, and even of frolic and carefree frivolity. From these, is it not just a short step to the comical?

If someone wished on this basis to contend that music itself is a master of comedy, he would nonetheless be taking a false path. He does not notice that he approaches instead special forms of the charming with his “gaiety, drollery, and light-footedness.” These special forms were discussed earlier in connection with the charming: they are “brightness, lightness and (454) agreeability,” perhaps too the “graceful,” but in any case certain forms of the “alluring.” But then we have left the domain of comedy and are in a quite different one. Pure music is quite capable of the charming, and even of all its special forms, but they were not in question.

As for program music, there are of course great examples. The best are perhaps to be found in Mozart’s operas (the exciting duet [of Susanna and Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro] “Le porte son serrate”), then the scenes with Beckmesser in Wagner, especially the one with Hans Sachs in the second act [of Die Meistersinger]; similarly Richard Strauss in Der Rosenkavalier (Ochs von Lerch-enau); Pfitzner151 in Palestrina (second act) [1917], Humperdinck¹⁵²; perhaps too some excerpts from operettas, but there one must be cautious, because the amusement in the comedy usually runs “along” with the music and scarcely touches it. On the other hand, some good examples can be drawn from collections of Lieder.

The question is: what do such examples mean? Do they testify that music that accompanies the comical text or a comical scene is itself comical? Or only that this music, by means of its mood, expresses concretely gaiety and frolic, roguishness and drollery, insofar as it is tied indissolubly to the comedy of the text or the scene?

After a detailed analysis with reference to the examples given, we will have to opt for the latter response. Yet that cannot be established any further; we must simply allow the relevant passages to be run through and then try to decide soberly whether we are suffering under a misapprehension – similarly to when we are victims of a slight of hand: namely, to ascribe to music what really belongs to the comical in comedy. Music fits so wonderfully to all shades of mood that it is almost impossible not to become a victim of the deception.

Wagner brought about such deception in the most genial way. Yet if one thinks of the Beckmesser passages without the text, without the stage setting, and without the gestures of the comic figures, one will not be quick to conclude that this music is intended to be “comical.” One will merely find them strange, and, at some points, even possessing a peculiar beauty.

c) The comical in the domain of individual strata

A more serious objection attacks the whole of all comical works, regardless of whether they belong to works of art or to the comical in life. But the objection is directed primarily to works of art. It asks whether it is really true that the comical rests always upon a “drop” in the strata of an object. This question has not been sufficiently answered in the discussions in Chap. 39a.

There is a phenomenon that appear to conflict with these discussions. Take the case of the comic play or the humorous story. Do they really have only the uniform comedy of the entire plot, which is built up out (455) of many strata and has enough latitude for a drop? Or is not the case rather that a special comedy of external appearances also exists, a comedy of situation and plot, character and behavior, indeed a comedy of destiny?

One cannot dispose of this question by explaining these varieties of the comical as parts of a whole that cannot be resolved into its members. In fact, it can easily be resolved into its parts, so much so that, for example, in the production of a play one or the other of its parts can be executed well or badly.

In The Twelfth Night, the external appearance of Malvolio, including his performance of vanity in love, can be magnificently executed, but in contrast, the comedy of the situation (for example, his meeting with the “young woman”) can leave us wishing for something better. The same is true for the two in respect of the comedy of character and behavior, and the comedy of destiny (the first in the believability of the entire “person,” the second perhaps in the scene with Viola’s involuntary swordfight with Sir Christopher [Andrew]).

In precisely this way, each of these elements varies quite freely against the others in a comical story. And, in fact, the special character of the story is to a great extent dependent upon it. Down to the most subtle gradations, the unique nature of a poet can be characterized by means of it (Jean Paul, Sterne153, Raabe, Reuter …).

One may not, therefore, think the relative independence of comedy in the individual strata to be inessential. They demand rather an explanation that gets to the very essence of the case. This can either be rooted in an account of comedy as a whole, in which there is latitude for every kind of drop, or it can concern itself with reflections specific to each individual stratum.

We must quickly note that the last of these prospects is quite doubtful – not because of any conflict with the theory, which could still be false – but because there exist other reasons for not isolating too much the individual comic elements upon a single stratum. Even a spectator’s fine sense of the comical warns him against doing so – as though there might still be standing everywhere behind this evident independence a connectedness with something that makes its weight felt there, even if we are not able to trace it out directly.

That is a clue offered by aesthetical feeling itself – one might even say by the feeling of value. The latter would no doubt be too narrow, for it expresses itself more like a sense of structure. Such a thing must not be ignored by the theory; for everything that can be discovered about the foundations of these phenomena depends upon such feelings.

We must therefore inquire further: what, then, do isolatable comic elements within the strata consist in? For example, that of the external bearing, the gestures, the demeanor? Do these comic elements really exist for themselves, even if they have a certain independence from the comical on the strata that follow it?

The external demeanor is comical only when it contrasts vividly with what it is intended to represent. Malvolio contrasts in his external (456) appearance with the personal dignity and importance that he tries to affect. This also expresses itself, to be sure, externally, but it belongs to an entirely different stratum – of the person as much as the “play” – roughly that of the character and of the moral stance taken. The “drop” that makes the comedy would therefore be, exactly as in the whole of the work, – located in the deep regions of the strata.

If that proves true, then the question is decided in favor of the developed theory, that is, it remains true that even the relatively isolatable comic elements on individual strata are not rooted in them alone (although they may appear only in that one), but rather they presuppose other strata and their storehouse of materials.

To elucidate the matter further, one should ask oneself in earnest: is situational comedy (perhaps in a scene) conceivable without the specific form bestowed upon the characters that take part in it? Are there situations among men that are so external that they are not also determined essentially by their peculiar mannerisms, their weaknesses, strengths, fears, and secret hopes? Apparently not. Concrete situations are what they become by the essential features of persons in them, and, taken strictly, the same situation cannot exist among quite different persons. The solution that has been offered should therefore be considered valid.

The question remains: why is it, then, that comedy in individual strata seems to us to be isolatable? But that was the phenomenon with which we began. There is much that can be argued here concerning deceptions, and also concerning presuppositions of which one is unaware – subjective presuppositions in the act, and objective ones in the object. All of that is no longer new, and may be laid to rest here.

But one thing must be said in this connection: in a larger total relation, as that of the appearance emerging from stratum to stratum in an artistically structured work, there are always many peculiar relations. In cases where one cannot tear these relationships from their larger interconnections, they may still appear to us with a certain detachedness and independence. That is what happens everywhere in this context.

And this “appearance” may indeed itself in turn count as entirely objective. It is not wrong to praise the performance of an actor for the one, and to criticize him for the other. For the performance in one and the same role, even in the same scene, is extremely complex and has latitude for many independent variations in which the partial performances are played off against each other. For that reason, each partial performance can be tied to the whole, and can be judged only from the perspective of the whole. (457)