The comic imagination deals in miraculous transformations and instantaneous casting-off of burdens and sufferings. It releases sudden floods of feelings and allows the purging of enmity in play. The comic sense can cause a sensation of wholeness and integrity of being, though one that is almost brief and passing. When we are in a festive mood and laughing, we seem to go out of our normally anxious, reflective selves into a different phase of being, and the comic flow within us dissolves our sense of limitation. Time stands still, and we feel ourselves to be the center of life. Mirth so intensifies the moment that it could be described as sanctifying life by the sheer unself-conscious vitality that it stimulates within us. No wonder, then, that the act of laughter and the surge of comic joy in a death-haunted, misery-prone creature could be, and sometimes has been, seen and felt as a natural intrusion of the miraculous into the self—as, that is, a religious experience.
ATTRIBUTION:
Robert M. Polhemus, U.S. educator, critic. Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce, ch. 1, University of Chicago Press (1980).
