The dearth of humorous situations--at no time inexhaustible--has compelled the two-reel comic to depend on such substitutes as speed, violence, and a succession of well-nigh inconceivable mishaps. A man acting in one cannot open a door, cross a street, or sit down to dinner without coming to grief. Even the animals--dogs, donkeys and pigs--are subject to catastrophes that must wreck their confidence in life. Fatness, besides being funny, is, under these circumstances, a great protection. The human body, swathed in rolls of cotton-wadding, is safe from contusions and broken bones. When an immensely stout lady sinks into an armchair, only to be precipitated through a trap-door, and shot down a slide into a pond, we feel she has earned her pay. But after she has been dropped from a speeding motor, caught and lifted high in air by a balloon anchor, let down to earth with a parachute, picked up by an elephant, and carried through the streets at the head of a circus parade, we begin to understand the arduousness of art. Only the producers of comic “movies” know what “One crowded hour of glorious life” can be made to hold. Laughter has been over-praised and over-analyzed, as well as unreasonably denounced. We do not think much about its determining causes--why should we?--until the contradictory definitions of philosophers, psychologists and men of letters compel us to recognize its inscrutable quality. Plato laid down the principle that our pleasure in the ludicrous originates in the sight of another’s misfortune. Its motive power is malice. Hobbes stoutly affirmed that laughter is not primarily malicious, but vainglorious. It is the rough, spontaneous assertion of our own eminence. “We laugh from strength, and we laugh at weakness.” Hazlitt saw a lurking cruelty in the amusement of civilized men who have gaged the folly and frivolity of their kind. Bergson, who evidently does not frequent motion-picture halls, says that the comic makes its appeal to “the intelligence pure and simple.” He raises laughter to the dignity of a “social gesture” and a corrective. We put our affections out of court, and impose silence upon our pity before we laugh; but this is only because the corrective would fail to correct if it bore the stamp of sympathy and kindness. Leacock, who deals in comics, is sure of but one thing, that all humour is anti-social; and Stevenson ascribes our indestructible spirit of mirth to “the unplumbed childishness of man’s imagination.”