[.ca] Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (ISBN 0486443809)

From Amazon.com:
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

first since Aristoteles:
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.

a labor to get through:
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.

Where Are the Clowns? There Ought to Be Clowns!:
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."

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. When Mel Brooks is playing a Polish actor playing Hitler, he says: "All I want is peace. A little piece of Poland, a tiny piece of France...." That is amusing -- the juxtaposition of the vital and the mechanical. More sophisticated jokes than such puns are based on the same juxtaposition. Here is one of Bergson's example, from a play by Labiche. "Just as M. Perrichon is getting into the railway carriage, he makes certain of not forgetting any of his parcels: 'Four, five, six, my wife seven, my daughter eight, and myself nine.'"

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.