If tragedy is made effective by provoking the phenomenon which psychology calls “empathy”Mby causing us, that is to say, actually to participate in the feelings of another—pure comedy must achieve its effects by completely inhibiting that phenomenon and by establishing a sense of separateness from the creatures whose antics we observe. Such sympathy as we feel for them is lofty and patronizing, like our sympathy for a child whose sorrows we know to be (however intense for him) transitory and trivial.
ATTRIBUTION:
Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970), U.S. author, editor. Experience and Art, ch. 2, H. Smith (1932).
