Another variety of amusing incident drawn from child-play and the popular fun of the circus is a repetition of words, gestures or other movements. These repetitions grow particularly funny when they take the form of an alternate going and coming, or of ending and recommencing a discourse. Amusing already in their semblance of purposeless play, they sometimes grow more droll by assuming a look of irrepressibility, as when the philosopher Pancrace in _Le Mariage forcé_ is again and again pushed behind the coulisse and returns to renew his discourse. It has been pointed out that such movements have something of the amusing character of the toy known as Jack-in-the-box.[287] Another class of repetitions, which we may call imitations, also frequent on the comic stage, seems in like manner to reproduce easily recognisable features of child’s play. Nothing is more characteristic of the play-mood in young animals and in children alike than an imitative {349} propagation of movement. The child’s game of making faces is an excellent example. The liking of the stage for these imitations shows how closely it remains in touch with primitive fun. This is plain enough when the action imitated is disorderly, as we may see in the rebuffs and counter-rebuffs of the circus. The repeated beatings of the wife-beater in _Le Médecin malgré lui_ have something of this diverting effect The amusing repetitions wrought into the mechanism of comedy are, as Molière may tell us, commonly far less aggressive. The reproduction of the series of exclamations of Cléonte on the perfidy of his mistress by his valet, Covielle, in _Le Bourgeois gentilhomme_, and the counterpart to this, the slightly varied repetitions of the reproaches of Cléonte’s mistress by her maid, are quite delightfully suggestive of a plot on the part of Love to reduce his victims to one level of imbecility.[288] Comedy, both ancient and modern, is full of trickery and dupery. A whole play may be one big piece of fooling, ending for the most part in a merry scene in which the deluded victim or victims come to their senses again. The spectator, who is in the secret, enjoys sympathetically the laughter of the plot-maker. One of the simplest and earliest comic devices, another outgrowth from child’s play, seems to be a disguise. The figures of comedy towards whom our laughter is guided are not gifted with the finest of visions, and a small amount of disguise, especially when it meets and flatters their desires, suffices for complete deception. Classic comedy and that of Shakespeare make large use of such trickery. {350} But a strange dress and other means of disguise are by no means always necessary for the befooling. When the credulous mood is on, the victim, whether fish or man, will rise to the crudest of artificial imitations, and comedy fastens on its victims when they are in this mood, as in the case of Malvolio, M. Jourdain and the rest.