Attitudes.

What do we find funny, and why do we so rarely find it in dance? I don't want to be serious here, and start pounding out theories from Henri Bergson's celebrated treatise on laughter, but it is strange that so much of physical humor, a humor virtually embodied in the comic symbol of the pratfall, seems verboten in dance. Perhaps the answer is, after all, self-evident. An art that spends so much of its energy keeping on its two feet is hardly going to relish falling down for comic effect--none of Doris Humphrey's classy "fall and recovery" here.

It might be said that theatrical dancing is basically, like theatrical singing, an unnatural act, and therefore basically funny. Romeos and Juliets do not go around singing or dancing their love, whatever West Side Story or Sergei Prokofiev may try to tell us. There is something inherently ridiculous about either dancing out or singing out our emotions, simply by being once removed from common experience. Sure, we dance (or sing) for joy--but isn't that usually a metaphor? We might be amused, intrigued, and pleased if a stranger, or even a friend, burst into song or did a little jig at the sheer magic of seeing us. But we would also be slightly embarrassed, particularly if the song or dance took place in a public setting.

Unless it's in a dance hall or on a village green, you perhaps have to be a little crazy to dance or sing in public without some acceptable camouflage such as footlights or a proscenium. A great friend of mine, a distinguished drama and film critic but very much an anti-dance man, once insisted that all ballet needed was a drunken sailor to come reeling down the aisle to expose the entire performance as a kind of subterfuge. He probably had a point, although I refrained from telling him that an intrusive drunken sailor wouldn't do much for one's lofty appreciation of Hamlet either. I suppose I never gave him that reply because I guiltily thought that there is something inherently unreal, and thus by inference comic, about the business of dance, especially classical ballet.

Think of the Rose Adagio in The Sleeping Beauty. Here is a woman, presumably a princess, being paraded around on toe-tip by four guys, presumably princes, watched by a bated-breath audience, presumably proletarians, to see if--oops!-she is going to fall off-balance. A Night at the Ballet--it's a little Marx Brothers if you think about it. Of course, luckily we don't, unless a drunken sailor staggers in to bring us back to reality.

I recall a London revue many years ago that offered four dancers, all immaculately got up in the appropriate swan costumes, simply doing--quite well--Ivanov's famous quartet for the Four Cygnets in Act II of Swan Lake. The audience roared with laughter, the laughter ever mounting as expressions of first puzzlement and then something closer to annoyance flitted across the dancers' faces. There was nothing wrong with the performances, except that instead of pointe shoes they were wearing galoshes.

Laughter is so often our human response to the unexpected. And the unexpected, when it questions the audience's assumptions, is something of which dance has to be wary. It's great to see Giselle pluck up a daisy to give to Albrecht, but when she pulls up a whole flowerpot as well as a flower, as I once witnessed at Covent Garden, let's just say the atmosphere changes, the illusion fades. We giggle, disconcerted.

Understandably dance is scared of going anywhere near that manner of comic catastrophe. However, certain kinds of dance--postmodern Dada, the travesty antics of the Trocks, and their imitators, a classical Russian troupe popular in Europe consisting entirely of overweight dancers--make an ongoing virtue of the self-consciously absurd.

And there are, so to speak, serious examples of dance comedy. In modern dance--at first thought of as a rather solemn business--we had choreographers such as Charles Weidman, even Martha Graham, later most magnificently Paul Taylor, and later still the likes of Larry Keigwin willing to tickle our funny bone. Classical ballet--which, with its greater stylization, is more reluctant to play the comic card--has had some choreographers, notably Frederick Ashton (Facade and A Wedding Bouquet) and Antony Tudor (Gala Performance), ready to let ballet laugh at itself. And once in a rare while (Bourree Fantasque perhaps) even George Balanchine was prepared to let his neoclassical pants down.

But dance's supreme comedy is surely Jerome Robbins' The Concert, an escalating tally of visual jokes on both dance itself and human behavior. Now why can't more dance be like that? Sheer fear! You never wish to draw attention to the stylization you are squatting on. It's bad for business, and maybe dangerous to art. Pratfalls are out.

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes also covers dance and theater for the New York Post.