The larger the theater itself, the more closely compacted the spectators, the more primitive is the comic effect which will provoke the swiftest and the most uproarious response; and the refined and delicate-minded minority finds itself conforming to the primitive tastes of the less particular majority, even if it does so only for the moment. While the curtain is up the high-brow has a fellow-feeling with his low-brow companions; and he is therefore willing not merely to smile deprecatingly but even to laugh heartily at mechanical dislocations of the vocabulary and at equally mechanical practical jokes. When he is a spectator of the passing show, the self-conscious Pharisee of culture will consent to fellowship with publicans and with sinners. In one of his earlier philosophical inquiries, that in which he analyzed the sources of laughter, Bergson recalled the old story of the man in church who remained dry-eyed when the rest of the congregation were dissolved in tears by the pathos of the sermon and who explained his failure to be moved as due to the fact that he did not “belong to that parish.” And Bergson asserted that this explanation, absurd as it may seem, is not unsatisfactory or illogical, if applied to laughter rather than to tears. “However hearty a laugh may be,” the French philosopher declared, “it always conceals an afterthought of complicity with other laughters, real or imaginary.” So it is that when the spectators refuse to become accomplices before the fact, there is no certainty that they will respond to the wit or to the humor of the play they are witnessing. Only when they have yielded themselves to a communal intimacy, so to call it, can the dramatist find an immediate appreciation of his merry jests. Shakspere spoke out of abundant experience as player and as playwright when he declared that “a jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it.” And Goethe was no less shrewd when he asserted that “nothing is more significant of men’s character than what they find laughable.” III The French, who have an armory of critical terms both more exact and more abundant than ours, distinguish between three different kinds of stage humor. There is, first of all, the mere witticism, the sentence laughable in itself, the so-called epigram; and this they term the _mot d’esprit_. Second, there is the phrase which derives its comic effect not from itself but from its utterance at a given moment in the movement of the story; and this they speak of as the _mot de situation_. Thirdly, there is the word or the sentence whereby a character expresses himself unexpectedly, unconsciously turning the flashlight on the unexplored recesses of his own soul; and they are wont to call this the _mot de caractère_.