To begin with, disorderliness, the upsetting of the usual orderliness of life, is a great source of laughter to the young and even to many adults. All the more extravagant forms of jollity or “high spirits” are wont to pass into the disorderly. This applies not merely to uproar, but to such “jocose” proceedings as smashing windows, the enjoyment of which, as Addison reminds us, is by some laid down as the test of humour. This being so, we might expect that the appearance of the disorderly would wear an amusing aspect for ordinary men. This is certainly what we find. The crowd loves the spectacle of lawlessness and misrule in the harlequinade and elsewhere. The laughter-moving force of the presentment of a man always in a hurry, or continually changing his purpose, illustrates this effect of the disorderly. The comic value of the man in a rage depends too in part on this circumstance. All appearances of disorder where order is counted on, as in dress, are apt to provoke a smile of amusement. A squad of soldiers marching out of time, or out of line, is a recognised stimulus to laughter. Even the sight of a room turned upside down for a cleaning, or of the confusion of a dinner-table after a meal, takes on something of this amusing aspect of the disorderly. The droll aspect of the disorderly becomes specialised in the breach of commonly-recognised rules of behaviour. The best marked cases are offences against the code of good manners, and the rules of correct speech. Rude behaviour and _gaucheries_, solecisms, provincialisms, and confusions in the use of language, amuse us as breaches of familiar rule, though they may no doubt entertain us also as manifestations of a naïve ignorance. It is hardly needful to point out that men’s judgments of the laughable element in breach of rule will be relative. {96} The code of manners will vary with the community and with the particular class, and will tend to change with time in the case of the same group. One has only to think of the variations, from period to period, in the fashionable modes of accost, of pronouncing words, and so on. The great force which tends to counteract this direction of laughter is the respect for order and rule, which has been formed slowly and with much difficulty, at least in the larger part of a community. It follows that if men who are supporters of rule are to laugh at a violation of it, the act of lawlessness must not seem of a gravity sufficient to offend this respect. This condition will be satisfied if it is manifest that the upsetting of rule, so far as it is intentional, is not serious but a sort of make-believe; or that it is confined within the limits of the harmless, as in the case of the angry man vainly threatening denunciation against all and sundry; or, again, that the failure to comply with rule is not intentional but due to ignorance.