Bergson's LAUGHTER (Class Edit)

Laughter:
On the Meaning of the Comic
Henri Bergson
(Class Edit)
CHAPTER I

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I

The comic does not exist outside what is HUMAN. A
landscape will never be laughable. You laugh at an animal because you have seen some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of is the shape that men have given it,--the human caprice whose mould it has assumed.
    I point out also the ABSENCE OF FEELING. It is enough to stop our ears to the sound of music for dancers to look funny. The comic requires a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.
    Laughter has a SOCIAL meaning. The comic comes  when people concentrate their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and using  nothing but their intelligence.

II

A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing. AS A RESULT, IN FACT, OF RIGIDITY OR OF MOMENTUM, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else. That is the reason the man falls and we laugh.
    Now, take the case of a person who attends to the petty occupations of his everyday life with mathematical precision. The objects around him, however, have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the result being that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it out all covered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a solid chair he finds himself sprawling on the floor, in a word his actions are all topsy-turvy or mere beating the air, while in every case the effect is one of momentum. Habit has given the impulse: what was wanted was to check the movement or deflect it. But he continued like a machine in the same straight line. The laughable element comes from a MECHANICAL INELASTICITY, where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living flexibility of a human being.
    What life and society require is attention to the present situation, with an elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt ourselves. But rigidity becomes comic, and laughter is its corrective.

III

Where does a ridiculous expression of the face come from? Automatism, inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and maintained, are clearly why a face makes us laugh. The art of the caricaturist consists in
detecting a tendency, and in making it visible by magnifying it.  Beneath the skin-deep harmony of form, he divines the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter.

IV

THE ATTITUDES, GESTURES AND MOVEMENTS OF THE HUMAN BODY ARE LAUGHABLE AS THAT BODY REMINDS US OF A MERE MACHINE.
The originality of a comic artist is shown in the life he gives to a mere puppet. In a public speaker, for instance, I find a certain movement of head or arm, a movement always the same. If I wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it, I laugh. Why? Because I see a machine that works automatically. This is not life, but automatism. It is comic.
    This is why gestures, at which we never dreamt of laughing, become laughable when imitated by another individual. Reflection shows that our mental state is ever changing, and if our gestures were as fully alive as we, they would never repeat themselves, and so would prevent imitation.
    Consider the impression you get from two faces that are alike, and you'll find you are thinking of two copies in the same mould. This deflection of life towards the mechanical is the cause of laughter.
    Laughter is even stronger if we find not merely two characters, but several, or as many as possible, with the same attitudes and moving the same way, as with marionettes.  By reason of their sameness, the bodies seem to stiffen as we gaze, and the actors seem transformed into automata.
    The art of the playwright consists in setting before us a clockwork arrangement of human events, while preserving a look of probability, so keeping something of the flow of life.

V

Any image of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade, is laughable. This follows when we see anything stereotyped or ready-made, on the surface of living society. There we have rigidity again, clashing with the flow of life.
    The ceremonial side of social life must include a comic element waiting for a chance to come out. For a ceremony to be comic, it is enough we observe the ceremonial element in it: ignore its matter and think only of its form, such as an ordinary prize-distribution to the solemn sitting of a court of justice. A form or formula is a ready-made frame into which the comic element may be fitted.
    As soon as we forget the serious object of a solemnity or a ceremony, those taking part in it seem puppets. Twenty years ago, a large steamer sank. Some passengers were rescued by boat. Custom-house officers, who had rushed to their assistance, began by asking them "if they had anything to declare."
    A mechanical element introduced into nature and an automatic regulation of society are thus two types of laughable effects.
    3. WE LAUGH WHEN A PERSON GIVES US THE IMPRESSION OF BEING A THING. We laugh at Sancho Panza tumbled into a bed-quilt and tossed into the air like a football. We laugh at Baron Munchausen turned into a cannon-ball and travelling through space. Certain tricks of circus clowns show another example of the same law. Clowns jump and fall, as if to say: "We are wooden dummies."

CHAPTER II

THE COMIC ELEMENT IN SITUATIONS AND THE COMIC ELEMENT IN WORDS

I

ANY ARRANGEMENT OF ACTS AND EVENTS IS COMIC THAT GIVES THE ILLUSION OF LIFE AND THE IMPRESSION OF A MECHANICAL ARRANGEMENT.
    1. THE JACK-IN-THE-BOX. As children we have all played with the little man who springs out of his box. You squeeze him flat, he jumps up again. Push him lower, he shoots up higher.
    Or consider a Punch and Judy show. No sooner does the policeman put in an appearance on the stage
than he receives a blow which fells him. Up and
down he flops and hops with the rhythm of the bending and release of a spring, while spectators laugh louder and louder.
    Many a comic scene are of this type. For instance, in the scene of the forced marriage between Sganarelle and Pancrace, the comic life is in the conflict between Sganarelle, who wishes to make the philosopher listen to him, and the philosopher, a talking-machine working automatically. As the scene progresses, the image of the Jack-in-the-box becomes clear, so that the characters themselves adopt its movements: Sganarelle pushing Pancrace, each time he shows himself, back into the wings; Pancrace returning to the stage each time to continue his patter. This REPETITION is a usual form of classic comedy.

3. THE SNOW-BALL.

A caller rushes into a drawing-room; he knocks against a lady, who upsets her cup of tea over an old gentleman, who slips against a glass window which falls in the street on to the head of a constable, arousing the whole police force.  The comic is what reveals a person's likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which suggests pure mechanism, automatism, movement without life. It expresses an imperfection which calls for correction. This is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and events.
    1. REPETITION.- You meet a friend in the street you
have not seen for a while; there is nothing comic here. But if you meet him again the same day, and then a third and a fourth time, you may laugh at the "coincidence."
    Comedy uses this method. One of the best-known examples is in bringing a group of characters, act after act, into different surroundings, so as to reproduce, under fresh circumstances, the same incidents.
    2. Inversion. Picture characters in a certain situation: if you reverse the situation and the roles, you have a comic scene. Thus, we laugh at the prisoner at the bar lecturing the magistrate or a child presuming to teach its parents; in a word, at everything that comes under the heading of "topsyturvydom." Thus comedy shows us a character who lays a trap in which he is the first to be caught.
    3. A situation is comic when it belongs to two series of events interpreted in two different ways at the same time. We see the real meaning of the situation, because care has been taken to show us every aspect of it; but each actor knows only one of these aspects: hence the mistakes and wrong judgments they make on what is going on around them and what they are doing themselves. It is this mental seesaw between two opposed interpretations which is at first apparent in the enjoyment we derive from an equivocal situation. The aim is the same MECHANISATION of life. You
take a set of actions and relations and repeat it as it is, or turn it upside down, or transfer it bodily to another set with which it partly coincides. These show life as a mechanism, with reversible action and interchangeable parts.

CHAPTER III

THE COMIC IN CHARACTER

I

Laughter has a social meaning; the comic expresses a lack of adaptability to society. An individual is comic who automatically goes his way without troubling about getting into touch with the rest of his fellow-beings. It is the part of laughter to reprove his absentmindedness and wake him from his dream.
    Every group must find a way to "break in" a person, to deal with rigid habits that have been formed and have now to be modified.
    Society works like this. Each member must attend to his social surroundings; he must model himself on his environment. Therefore society holds suspended over each individual the threat of correction. Such is the function of laughter.
    It is the SMALL faults of our fellow-men that make us laugh. A flexible vice may not be so easy to ridicule as a rigid virtue. It is rigidity that society eyes with suspicion.
    Whether a person is good or bad matters little:
if he is unsociable, he's comic. Unsociability in the performer and insensibility in the spectator are the two main conditions.
    A third condition is automatism. What is laughable is what is done automatically. The comic is the involuntary gesture or the unconscious remark. Absentmindedness is comical. The deeper the absentmindedness the higher the comedy.

IV

Don Quixote sees giants where we see windmills. This is comical; it is also absurd. It is a reversal of common sense. It consists in trying to fit things to an idea of one's own, instead of fitting one's ideas to things.    
    The comic character errs through obstinacy of mind or of disposition, through absentmindedness, in short, through automatism. There is a  rigidity that compels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straight along, to shut their ears and refuse to listen.

THE END

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