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Page 167
else (since it isn't we who are falling into that error). For Hegel, the essential element of the Comic is that whoever laughs feels so sure of his or her own rightness as to be able to experience a sense of superiority when observing the contradictions in others. The kind of rightness, which makes us laugh at the misfortune of someone who is inferior, is, of course, diabolical, and on this point Baudelaire had already said everything there was to say. The typical example of this species of the Comic is that of the miles gloriosus as he struts about and slips on a banana peel; we expected from him a somewhat different behavior; we have not slipped, we are delighted and diabolically surprised, and therefore we laugh.
Pirandello gives the example of a decrepit old woman who smears her face with makeup and dresses as a young girl. He says, I notice that this old woman is the opposite of what a respectable old woman should look like. This is the incident that breaks the normal sequence of expectation, and the sense of superiority that I experience (since I understand someone else's error) makes me laugh.
But at this point Pirandello adds that the "perception of the opposite" may become "the sentiment of the opposite." Reflection (artistic consciousness) undergoes here a new development: it attempts to understand the reason why the old woman masks herself under the delusion of regaining her lost youth. The character is no longer separate from me; in fact, I try to get inside the character. In so doing, I lose my own sense of superiority because I think that I could be she. My laughter is mixed with pity; it becomes a smile. I have moved from the Comic to Humor. Pirandello sees with great clarity that, in order to take this step, one must give up detachment and superioritythe classic characteristics of the Comic. Pirandello's best example is that of Cervantes: all that Don Quixote does is comic. But Cervantes does not limit himself to laughing at a madman who mistakes windmills for giants. Cervantes lets you understand that he too could be Don Quixotein fact, he is: like Don Quixote, he has fought against the Turks, believing in an ideal which he now questions; he has lost a hand and personal freedom, and has not found glory. Don Quixote is, therefore, a great novel of Humor. Orlando Furioso is not, because Ariosto, once he has shown us Astolfo flying on the hippogrypha heroic fairy-tale visionlimits himself to a "perception of the opposite": at nightfall, Astolfo dismounts and goes to sleep at an inn (the opposite of the heroic is the everyday; of the exceptional, the common; of a knight errant, the traveling salesman or the merchant).
If we were to improve Pirandello's definition, we could perhaps say

 
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