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This work, by Professor Bergson, has been revised in detail by the author himself, and the present translation is the only authorised one. For this ungrudging labour of revision, for the thoroughness with which it has been carried out, and for personal sympathy in many a difficulty of word and phrase, we desire to offer our grateful acknowledgment to Professor Bergson.Amazon.com Review
Clem Kadiddlehopper wore a funny hat. Even animals other than humans s… More >>
One of the least funny books ever written about comedy, Henri Bergson’s slim treatise aims to discover why people laugh and the significance of their laughter. But the “principles” that unfold, such as “A deformity that may become comic is a deformity that a normally built person could successfully imitate” and “The attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine,” suggest that the only way Bergson knew how to take comic situations seriously was to drain all the humor out of them. He finally concludes that laughter is an instrument of social correction which, “by checking the outer manifestations of certain failings, thus causes the person laughed at to correct these failings and thereby improve himself inwardly.” The only problem is that laughter is completely unreflexive and totally chaotic; consequently it “cannot be absolutely just,” which is why some innocent people get mocked mercilessly and some transgressions pass unnoticed. Such, Bergson shrugs, is life; by the time he’s through analyzing humor to death, readers may feel about LAUGHTER the same way Bergson feels about laughter: “the substance is scanty, and the after-taste bitter.”
Rating: 1 / 5
Henri Bergson believed that to laugh was to correct. Only the intellectual laughed, one who was detached from emotion. Bergson’s claim is that laughter requires an absence of emotion, yet at the same time throughout his essay he proved how laughter is always accompanied with emotion. Bergson’s main thesis loses value in his assertion of the necessity of understanding another to laugh, his own attachment of emotion to laughter and his consistent contradiction of his points throughout the work. In the non-emotional world where Bergson resides pure-intelligences refrain from all tears but still participate in laughter. Laughter is a state of no emotion which those who understand the social and moral laws use as a tool. Of course one must have risen above emotion to use this tool. In fact according to Bergson it is impossible to laugh if one has emotion. The first problem to this thesis is found on pg. 11 where he is describing what is necessary for someone to laugh, “This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other intelligences.” The idea that one individual can be in touch with another revolves around the essence of emotion. It is impossible to read another person without emotion.
Understanding and feeling another’s perspective is the only way to be in touch with that person. Thus an intelligent person who apparently is the one who laughs is also the one who is in touch with others. Bergson goes on to further contradict himself as he reiterates later on that one must silence his/her emotions and rely only on intelligence. The most intelligent person according to Bergson is a laugher. He says, “Comedy can only begin at the point where our neighbors personality ceases to affect us.” (121). Heaven help us if the most knowledgeable leaders of society are people without feeling for the person next door. Bergson himself adds emotion to laughter himself in a statement he writes on pg. 95. “If laughter were not always a pleasure and mankind did not pounce upon the slightest excuse for indulging in it.” Does not the feeling of pleasure require an emotion? Pleasure is an emotion. Pleasure cannot be described appropriately without attaching the word feeling to it. One cannot be absent in feeling and then feel pleasure at the same time. Does one look for the slightest excuse to do something that brings them no feeling? According to Bergson it does.
Bergson’s final statements about laughter also add emotion. Laughter is apparently gaiety on the outside and when one really comes to know it then it becomes bitter. How does one know gaiety? He/she feels it. How does one know bitterness? She/he feels it. What is emotion? It is simply being in a certain state of feeling. While discussing the cause of laughter interpersonally Bergson said this: “Or rather our body sympathizes…we put ourselves for a very short time in his place…if amused by anything laughable in him, invite him, in imagination to share his amusement with us”(175). All of the sudden laughter has become a sympathizing moment, it no longer is a point where we could care less about our neighbor. Then on the following page his argument changes again. “It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness.” Within in a matter of two pages Bergson has labeled laughter as sympathizing and then without sympathy. If Bergson was able to make up his own mind about the nature of laughter perhaps he would be more convincing. Laughter sometimes holds no consideration for another person, Bergson is correct there. Where he has failed is in covering only one aspect of laughter. Although Bergson tried to describe laughter as something intended to humiliate, even he could not stick to his point. Laughter, in his writing, came with emotion no matter what way he attempted to get around it. His own writing destroyed his thesis as it smelled of laughter being an emotional experience.
Rating: 2 / 5
The blessed healing of laughter and of those who are gifted in bringing it to us. A great read for anyone who wants to live and look at the lighter side of life.
Rating: 5 / 5
Bergson is the second philosopher who consider laughter and try to find out the reasons why we laugh. Aristoteles did also this in his book about comedy, but here we have a more modern view on it. I recommend this to all who are interested in why and from what we laugh.
Rating: 4 / 5
Like Socrates, French Philosopher and Nobel Prize Winner for Literature Henri Bergson is associated with a “method.” Socrates piled question after question upon the hapless denizens of Athens. Bergson posed questions not to citizens but to situations, gestures, stage plays, puns, quips, oddities and mannerisms. He asked: what makes this so funny, laughable, risible?
If his book LAUGHTER were a prize fight, it would still be going on: for it never delivers a knock-out punch. LAUGHTER never quite succeeds in defining what makes the humorous uniquely what it is. Perhaps Bergson never intended to deliver a crushing blow or write the last word. Perhaps he was more the butterfly gathering nurture first here then somewhere else. Certainly, his thought was always in motion. But then so was life, in his view.
The way Henri Bergson analyzes humor is consistent with his theory of life. Not for him Descartes’s view of man as a mind locked into a machine. Henri Bergson does accept that spirit is not matter and that a man’s soul is always being tempted by his body to cease growing, cease adapting to reality, tempted to grow lazy, “inattentive” and eccentric.
We laugh when we see people layering themselves with something alien to their best nature. They wear disguises, like clowns or the emperor who preened himself on his invisible clothes. They repeat cliches from the ceremonial side of life that don’t apply to the spontaneous challenges of love, politics or art.
When men lose interactive, supportive touch with their society, we laugh at them. We thereby simultaneously salute their spirit while rebuking their giving in to the downward tug of their flesh. Laughter is the medicine by which society, a living thing, heals itself. Laughter is the abrasive scouring away the barnacles growing on living flesh. Laughter is what the doctor ordered.
Next time you chuckle over a cartoon, try out a little Bergsonian analysis. Does that talking dog remind you of a person? Does that man trapped against his will in an office romance remind you of an animal caught in a trap? Does that robot seriously think itself in love with the scientist who created it? Laughter thrives on imperfection, exaggeration, the conquest of the living by the mechanical. Or so says Henri Bergson. -OOO-
Rating: 4 / 5