This classic explores why people laugh and what laughter means. According to Bergson, laughter helps us retain our humanity during an age of mechanization. His belief in life as a vital impulse, indefinable by reason alone, informs his perception of comedy as the relief we experience upon distancing ourselves from the mechanistic.
Clem Kadiddlehopper wore a funny hat. Even animals other than humans seem to laugh, because they, too, possess emotions. And sometimes, when you’re by yourself, you just start giggling for no reason. But that’s not funny. As Henri Bergson, proto-existentialist French philosopher and author of Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, would say, you can stop laughing now. We must rethink what tickles us. For Bergson, laughter is a purely intellectual response that serves the social purpose of assuaging discomfort over the unaccustomed and unexpected. We chuckle at Lucy attempting to wrap the bonbons speeding by on a candy-factory conveyor belt because she’s stuck in one place, performing the same task over and over, and failing; we hope that in similar situations we could be more flexible. Bergson recaps: “Rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.”
Bergson’s thinking typifies a peculiarly Gallic tendency to rationalize the apparently ephemeral and subjective (in this case, humor), discussing it in exquisitely rarefied language in order to assert that which defies common sense (a funny hat is not funny, laughter expresses no emotion, no one laughs alone) but partakes nonetheless of a logical inevitability. Laughter, first published in 1911, clearly draws upon the early years of European modernism, yet also prefigures the movement in some ways. In recognizing the comic as it embodies itself in a “rigid,” absentminded person, locked into repetitious, socially awkward behavior, Bergson–even as he looks backward, primarily to Molière–seems to be spawning the sophisticated visual and physical comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd; the transformation of Léger’s figures into anthropoid machines; and Nijinsky’s starring role in Stravinsky’s satirical clockwork ballet Pétrouchka.
This little book resurrects a British translation that has long been out of print. While Laughter won’t quite explain why the French love Jerry Lewis, or keep you in stitches, it’s a bracing read that will make you think twice about laughing the next time someone stumbles into a lamppost. –Robert Burns Neveldine
Enormously provocative Yes, it is true: Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is funnier than this analysis of laughter. But they are equally provocative. Bergson’s thesis may not suit all of us, but it must challenge even those of us involved in the comedic professions to re-examine why people laugh. I think his observation of what makes something funny as opposed to tragic – the elimination of emotion – is pretty spot on. How else could we laugh at someone falling down the stairs? The moment we think of the actual pain or humiliation, the comedy dies at least a little. While the book does not directly attack the magic of those beings, clowns and tricksters, who simulataneaously inspire laughter and sadness and/or fear, the principles of the book lead to what sorts of rules these people follow. If you can extraploate from the thought laid out here, many, many questions will be answered and perhaps even more raised. Which makes this an indispensible book for anyone in the performing arts. Highly, highly recommended.
A bit dated. Somewhat incomplete. Astoundingly insightful Before reading this essay, you should be forewarned that it was written by the same great opponent of Cartesian dualism that resisted the reduction of psychological phenomena to physical states. In other words, this is an early 20th century French philosophical essay. To go further, it’s a bit dry. Still, it is hard to argue with many of the axioms that Bergson espouses in this essay. For the most part, the laughter caused by much of modern comedy can be explained using one of his primary axioms or their many corollaries. Bergson’s biggest miss here, however, is that although he adequately explains why a comic may cause an individual to laugh at either the comic himself or a third party, he doesn’t sufficiently explain, or even realize, that much of what the comic intends is for his audience to laugh at themselves. Even so, you can still ascribe Bergson’s incisive deductions to include the comic audience and still come to the heart of why people laugh. In any event, to my knowledge the subject has never been tackled so logically. Certainly, no (funny) comedian will ever attempt to publicly disclose the nature of laughter, but don’t suppose that there aren’t many famous comedians out there today who are familiar with this essay. It is obvious that many comedians and writers are familiar with this essay and that they have put these axioms directly to the test to great comic effect on many occasions. A word of advice to anyone who has difficulty wading through the chapters of Bergson’s dry, recondite language: Read it in your head with the voice of baby Stewie from the Family Guy in mind. This technique amused me through the first half of the book, and by that time the language didn’t bother me so much anymore.
Still profound after all these years Why is a pun amusing? In brief, it treats something human as if it were something mechanical. Language is a way of conveying meanings from one human to another, and the most inflexible, most mechanical, most artifiial POSSIBLE way of looking at words is to classify them by their sound alone. That’s precisely what a pun does.
Enormously provocative Yes, it is true: Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is funnier than this analysis of laughter. But they are equally provocative. Bergson’s thesis may not suit all of us, but it must challenge even those of us involved in the comedic professions to re-examine why people laugh. I think his observation of what makes something funny as opposed to tragic – the elimination of emotion – is pretty spot on. How else could we laugh at someone falling down the stairs? The moment we think of the actual pain or humiliation, the comedy dies at least a little. While the book does not directly attack the magic of those beings, clowns and tricksters, who simulataneaously inspire laughter and sadness and/or fear, the principles of the book lead to what sorts of rules these people follow. If you can extraploate from the thought laid out here, many, many questions will be answered and perhaps even more raised. Which makes this an indispensible book for anyone in the performing arts. Highly, highly recommended.
A bit dated. Somewhat incomplete. Astoundingly insightful Before reading this essay, you should be forewarned that it was written by the same great opponent of Cartesian dualism that resisted the reduction of psychological phenomena to physical states. In other words, this is an early 20th century French philosophical essay. To go further, it’s a bit dry. Still, it is hard to argue with many of the axioms that Bergson espouses in this essay. For the most part, the laughter caused by much of modern comedy can be explained using one of his primary axioms or their many corollaries. Bergson’s biggest miss here, however, is that although he adequately explains why a comic may cause an individual to laugh at either the comic himself or a third party, he doesn’t sufficiently explain, or even realize, that much of what the comic intends is for his audience to laugh at themselves. Even so, you can still ascribe Bergson’s incisive deductions to include the comic audience and still come to the heart of why people laugh. In any event, to my knowledge the subject has never been tackled so logically. Certainly, no (funny) comedian will ever attempt to publicly disclose the nature of laughter, but don’t suppose that there aren’t many famous comedians out there today who are familiar with this essay. It is obvious that many comedians and writers are familiar with this essay and that they have put these axioms directly to the test to great comic effect on many occasions. A word of advice to anyone who has difficulty wading through the chapters of Bergson’s dry, recondite language: Read it in your head with the voice of baby Stewie from the Family Guy in mind. This technique amused me through the first half of the book, and by that time the language didn’t bother me so much anymore.
Still profound after all these years Why is a pun amusing? In brief, it treats something human as if it were something mechanical. Language is a way of conveying meanings from one human to another, and the most inflexible, most mechanical, most artifiial POSSIBLE way of looking at words is to classify them by their sound alone. That’s precisely what a pun does.