d) The occasion for releasing comic pleasure vanishes when the attention is fixed on the comparison capable of giving rise to the comic. Under such circumstances the comic force is lost from that which is otherwise sure to produce a comic effect. A movement or a mental activity cannot become comical to him whose interest is fixed at the time of comparing this movement with a standard which distinctly presents itself to him. Thus the examiner does not see the comical in the nonsense produced by the student in his ignorance; he is simply annoyed by it, whereas the offender’s classmates who are more interested in his chances of passing the examination than in what he knows, laugh heartily over the same nonsense. The teacher of dancing or gymnastics seldom has any eyes for the comic movements of his pupils, and the preacher entirely loses sight of humanity’s defects of character, which the writer of comedy brings out with so much effect. The comic process cannot stand examination by the attention, it must be able to proceed absolutely unnoticed in a manner similar to wit. But for good reasons, it would contradict the nomenclature of “conscious processes” which I have used in _The Interpretation of Dreams_, if one wished to call it of necessity _unconscious_. It rather belongs to the _foreconscious_, and one may use the fitting name “automatic” for all those processes which are enacted in the foreconscious and dispense with the attention energy which is connected with consciousness. The process of comparison of the expenditures must remain automatic if it is to produce comic pleasure. _Conditions Disturbing the Discharge_ e) It is exceedingly disturbing to the comic if the case from which it originates gives rise at the same time to a marked release of affect. The discharge of the affective difference is then as a rule excluded. Affects, disposition, and the attitude of the individual in occasional cases make it clear that the comic comes or goes with the viewpoint of the individual person; that only in exceptional cases is there an absolute comic. The dependence or relativity of the comic is therefore much greater than of wit, which never happens but is regularly made, and at its production one may already give attention to the conditions under which it finds acceptance. But affective development is the most intensive of the conditions which disturb the comic, the significance of which is well known.[79] It is therefore said that the comic feeling comes most in tolerably indifferent cases which evince no strong feelings or interests. Nevertheless it is just in cases with affective release that one may witness the production of a particularly strong expenditure-difference in the automatism of discharge. When Colonel Butler answers Octavio’s admonitions with “bitter laughter,” exclaiming: “Thanks from the house of Austria!”