What seems most manifestly characteristic of verbal forms of the “funny” is the intrusion of the playful impulse. Children’s word-play shows this clearly enough. New words are for them sounds to be reduced to familiar ones, and the funnier the results of this reduction the better are they pleased. This leads by a step to punning, where quite intelligible words or phrases are purposely altered so as to bring in a new meaning; or where without any verbal alteration the substitution of a new meaning for the primary and obvious one effects the required change. The playful impulse to get as far away as possible from rule and restriction, to turn things topsy-turvy, to seize on the extravagant and wildly capricious, is clearly enough recognisable here. Much of this word-play, too, has a close kinship with make-believe; a natural and obvious meaning is the pretence in this case, whereas the reality is the half-hidden meaning introduced by the inventive wag. All the same it seems to me that this group of laughable objects has its place close to that of the incongruous and absurd. A pun that claims any intellectual rank must have a point, a bite, and this would appear to be most naturally secured by introducing an element of irony and rendering the primary and obvious meaning of the sentence ludicrously false. When, for example, a preacher whose ponderous dulness had set his congregation genteelly scuttling was said to have delivered “a very _moving_ discourse,” the point of the witty thrust lay in the complete opposition between the best and the worst result of eloquence brought together in the two meanings of “moving,” an opposition which gives the trenchant irony to the description. In cases, too, where there is no verbal trickery the lighter {113} kind of wit shows the same tendency to a playful capriciousness of fancy. It delights in substituting for our ordinary points of view and standards of reference others which strike the hearer as amusingly fanciful and extravagant. This is illustrated by much of our entertaining talk, which is wont to try to escape for a moment from the leading-strings of sober sense; as when a person _à propos_ of a moon looking wan and faint some hours after an eclipse observed that she seemed not yet to have got over the effects of the eclipse.