The forms of humor are extraordinarily varied according to the nature of the emotional feelings which are economized in favor of humor, as sympathy, anger, pain, compassion, etc. And this series seems incomplete because the sphere of humor experiences a constant enlargement, as often as an artist or writer succeeds in mastering humoristically the, as yet, unconquered emotional feelings and in making them, through artifices similar to those in the above example, a source of humoristic pleasure. Thus the artists of _Simplicissimus_ have worked wonders in gaining humor at the expense of fear and disgust. The manifestations of humor are above all determined by two peculiarities, which are connected with the conditions of its origin. In the first place, humor may appear fused with wit or any other form of the comic; whereby it is entrusted with the task of removing a possible emotional development which would form a hindrance to the pleasurable effect. Secondly, it can entirely set aside this emotional development or only partially, which is really the more frequent case, because the simpler function and the different forms of “broken”[83] humor, results in that humor which smiles under its tears. It withdraws from the affect a part of its energy and gives instead the accompanying humoristic sound. As may be noticed by former examples the humoristic pleasure gained by entering into sympathy with a thing results from a special technique resembling displacement through which the liberation of affect held ready is disappointed and the energy occupation is deflected to other, and, not often, to secondary matters. This does not help us, however, to understand the process by which the displacement from the development of affect proceeds in the humoristic person himself. We see that the recipient intimates the producer of the humor in his psychic processes, but we discover nothing thereby concerning the forces which make this process possible in the latter. We can only say, when, for example, somebody succeeds in paying no heed to a painful affect because he holds before himself the greatness of the world’s interest as a contrast to his own smallness, that we see in this no function of humor but one of philosophic thinking, and we gain no pleasure even if we put ourselves into his train of thought. The humoristic displacement is therefore just as impossible in the light of conscious attention as is the comic comparison; like the latter it is connected with the condition to remain in the foreconscious—that is to say, to remain automatic.