PASCAL: TWINS ARE FUNNY. I posted here that an advantage of being an identical twin is that people find twins amusing. I was reading Tony Tanner’s essay on The Comedy of Errors, in which Shakespeare gets his comedy from two pairs of twins, and came across Tanner’s view that twins are funny. Tanner writes: “For some reason—think about it—the phenomenon is funny.” Tanner then quotes Blaise Pascal: “Two faces that are alike, though neither of them excites laughter in itself, make me laugh when together on account of the likeness.”
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I would like to observe that twins also seem to be used as spooky characters as well, though now that I am making that observation I can’t come up with any examples to back it up. Maybe I’m thinking of just pairs of similar-looking people, like the two little girl ghosts in the movie The Shining. They’re not twins but they’re dressed identically.