Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/330

with our personal development towards a higher stage of culture, to limit our muscular work and increase our mental work. By heightening our mental expenditure we produce a diminution of motion expenditure for the same activity. Our machines bear witness to this cultural success.^[1]

Thus it coincides with a uniform understanding that that person appears comical to us who puts forth too much expenditure in his psychical activities and too little in his mental activities; and it cannot he denied that in both cases our laughing is the expression of a pleasurably perceived superiority which we adjudge to ourselves in comparison with him. If the relation in both cases becomes reversed, that is, if the somatic expenditure of the other is less and the psychic expenditure greater, then we no longer laugh, but are struck with amazement and admiration.^[2]

Comic of Situation

The origin of the comic pleasure discussed here, that is, the origin of such pleasure in a comparison

1. “What one has not in his head,” as the saying goes, “he must have in his legs.”
2. The problem has been greatly confused by the general conditions determining the comic, whereby the comic pleasure is seen to have its source now in a too-muchness and now in a not-enoughness.