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(g) of all the contemporary French philosophers, not the amiable conversationalist Alain, but the metaphysician Bergson and the sociologist Lalo; and
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(h) the father of neurosis, Sigmund Freud, who revealed the tragic aspects and the death wish lying at the bottom of our unconscious.
There are even more, but this list should be sufficient. Pirandello is in good company. We would all agree that if human existence were as Pirandello describes it, there wouldn't be much reason to laugh about it. And sure enough, here is Pirandello writing on Humor.
To understand why he would want to do that, all we have to do is to go back to one of Baudelaire's definitions: laughter is profoundly human; therefore, it must also be diabolical. Angels do not laugh (busy as they are standing in unbelievably large numbers on the head of a pin), but the devils do. They have time to waste, a whole eternity to give expression to their uneasiness. Now, it is precisely the uneasiness manifested by those who have theorized on the Comic that inclines us to think that the Comic must be somehow connected with uneasiness.
(4) One last characteristic of those who have discussed the problem of the Comic: either they have failed (as, for instance, have Freud and Bergson) to give us a definition that includes all of its possible manifestations, or they have given a definition that includes too many things, far more than those that common sense calls Comic. This is the case with Pirandello. His essay "Humor" becomes a metaphysical treatise that could be called Everything (but Nothing Else). The only thing that the essay "Humor" does not define, as we shall see, is the Humor of Pirandello.
We are confronted, then, with an ambiguous text. At first it seems to aim at a definition of Humor, then it touches on some definitions of the Comic and Irony, only to end by giving a definition of Art in general, or at least of Pirandello's Art, and by being therefore a text of a writer's poetics; finally revealing its true essence, as I will show later, as a drama or play by Pirandello which has erroneously taken the form of an essay. Let us try to read this essay three times, in these three different ways:
(1) as an imprecise and insufficient definition of Humor;
(2) as the enunciation of Pirandello's own poetics; and

 
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