The Comic:

Silvano Arieti:

"The individual who perceives wit undergoes a pleasant experience, as said, which entail a feeling of amusement and tends to make him smile or laugh."

"when Italians hear or read something Spanish for the first time in their lives, they laugh or smile - that is, they react as though they perceive comic stimulus."

"The subject perceives a comical stimulus when he is set to react to A and then finds himself reacting to B, because of a confusion between the identity and similarity of A and B."

"A principle that logicians generally call Leibnitz's law states: 'X is identical to Y if Y has every property that Y has and Y has every property that X has.' The Von Domarus law or principle followed by the person who thinks paleologically can then be reformulated in this way: "X is identical to Y if X has at least one property that Y has and Y has at least one property that X has.

My theory of the comic, as advanced for the first time in 1950 (Arieti, 1950), can be stated as follows: 'A subect is a perceiver of a comical stimulus when he realizes that he tends to identify X with Y, not in accordance with Leibnitz's law, but in accordance with Von Domarus' law.' For such a realization, the person does not need to know what Leibnitz and Von Domarus' laws are, of course, just as he does not need to know that he adopts Aristotele's laws of thought whenever he thinks logically. ... Wit is a particular form of the comic, inasmuch as the required confusion between similarity and identity necessarily occurs in the field of cognition."