Gondiinet's characters on arriving in a town and learning that there
is an extinct volcano in the neighbourhood, "They had a volcano, and
they have let it go out!"

Let us go on to society. As we are both in and of it, we cannot help
treating it as a living being. Any image, then, suggestive of the
notion of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade, so
to speak, will be laughable. Now, such a notion is formed when we
perceive anything inert or stereotyped, or simply ready-made, on the
surface of living society. There we have rigidity over again,
clashing with the inner suppleness of life. The ceremonial side of
social life must, therefore, always include a latent comic element,
which is only waiting for an opportunity to burst into full view. It
might be said that ceremonies are to the social body what clothing
is to the individual body: they owe their seriousness to the fact
that they are identified, in our minds, with the serious object with
which custom associates them, and when we isolate them in
imagination, they forthwith lose their seriousness. For any
ceremony, then, to become comic, it is enough that our attention be
fixed on the ceremonial element in it, and that we neglect its
matter, as philosophers say, and think only of its form. Every one
knows how easily the comic spirit exercises its ingenuity on social
actions of a stereotyped nature, from an ordinary prize-distribution
to the solemn sitting of a court of justice. Any form or formula is
a ready-made frame into which the comic element may be fitted.

Here, again, the comic will be emphasised by bringing it nearer to
its source. From the idea of travesty, a derived one, we must go
back to the original idea, that of a mechanism superposed upon life.
Already, the stiff and starched formality of any ceremonial suggests