Laughter - Henri Bergson (books to read for self improvement txt) 📗

ludicrous. A flexible vice may not be so easy to ridicule

as a rigid virtue. It is rigidity that society eyes with suspicion.

Consequently, it is the rigidity of Alceste that makes us laugh,

though here rigidity stands for honesty. The man who withdraws into

himself is liable to ridicule, because the comic is largely made up

of this very withdrawal. This accounts for the comic being so

frequently dependent on the manners or ideas, or, to put it bluntly,

on the prejudices, of a society.

 

It must be acknowledged, however, to the credit of mankind, that

there is no essential difference between the social ideal and the

rule, that it is the faults of others that make us laugh, provided

we add that they make us laugh by reason of their UNSOCIABILITY

rather than of their IMMORALITY. What, then, are the faults capable

of becoming ludicrous, and in what circumstances do we regard them

as being too serious to be laughed at?

 

We have already given an implicit answer to this question. The

comic, we said, appeals to the intelligence, pure and simple;

laughter is incompatible with emotion. Depict some fault, however

trifling, in such a way as to arouse sympathy, fear, or pity; the

mischief is done, it is impossible for us to laugh. On the other

hand, take a downright vice,—even one that is, generally speaking,

of an odious nature,—you may make it ludicrous if, by some suitable

contrivance, you arrange so that it leaves our emotions unaffected.

Not that the vice must then be ludicrous, but it MAY, from that time

forth, become so. IT MUST NOT AROUSE OUR FEELINGS; that is the sole

condition really necessary, though assuredly it is not sufficient.

 

But, then, how will the comic poet set to work to prevent our

feelings being moved? The question is an embarrassing one. To clear

it up thoroughly, we should have to enter upon a rather novel line

of investigation, to analyse the artificial sympathy which we bring

with us to the theatre, and determine upon the circumstances in

which we accept and those in which we refuse to share imaginary joys

and sorrows. There is an art of lulling sensibility to sleep and

providing it with dreams, as happens in the case of a mesmerised

person. And there is also an art of throwing a wet blanket upon

sympathy at the very moment it might arise, the result being that

the situation, though a serious one, is not taken seriously. This

latter art would appear to be governed by two methods, which are

applied more or less unconsciously by the comic poet. The first

consists in ISOLATING, within the soul of the character, the feeling

attributed to him, and making it a parasitic organism, so to speak,

endowed with an independent existence. As a general rule, an intense

feeling successively encroaches upon all other mental states and

colours them with its own peculiar hue; if, then, we are made to

witness this gradual impregnation, we finally become impregnated

ourselves with a corresponding emotion. To employ a different image,

an emotion may be said to be dramatic and contagious when all the

harmonics in it are heard along with the fundamental note. It is

because the actor thus thrills throughout his whole being that the

spectators themselves feel the thrill. On the contrary, in the case

of emotion that leaves us indifferent and that is about to become

comic, there is always present a certain rigidity which prevents it

from establishing a connection with the rest of the soul in which it

has taken up its abode. This rigidity may be manifested, when the

time comes, by puppet-like movements, and then it will provoke

laughter; but, before that, it had already alienated our sympathy:

how can we put ourselves in tune with a soul which is not in tune

with itself? In Moliere’s L’Avare we have a scene bordering upon

drama. It is the one in which the borrower and the usurer, who have

never seen each other, meet face to face and find that they are son

and father. Here we should be in the thick of a drama, if only greed

and fatherly affection, conflicting with each other in the soul of

Harpagon, had effected a more or less original combination. But such

is not the case. No sooner has the interview come to an end than the

father forgets everything. On meeting his son again he barely

alludes to the scene, serious though it has been: “You, my son, whom

I am good enough to forgive your recent escapade, etc.” Greed has

thus passed close to all other feelings ABSENTMINDEDLY, without

either touching them or being touched. Although it has taken up its

abode in the soul and become master of the house, none the less it

remains a stranger. Far different would be avarice of a tragic sort.

We should find it attracting and absorbing, transforming and

assimilating the divers energies of the man: feelings and

affections, likes and dislikes, vices and virtues, would all become

something into which avarice would breathe a new kind of life. Such

seems to be the first essential difference between high-class comedy

and drama.

 

There is a second, which is far more obvious and arises out of the

first. When a mental state is depicted to us with the object of

making it dramatic, or even merely of inducing us to take it

seriously, it gradually crystallises into ACTIONS which provide the

real measure of its greatness. Thus, the miser orders his whole life

with a view to acquiring wealth, and the pious hypocrite, though

pretending to have his eyes fixed upon heaven, steers most skilfully

his course here below. Most certainly, comedy does not shut out

calculations of this kind; we need only take as an example the very

machinations of Tartuffe. But that is what comedy has in common with

drama; and in order to keep distinct from it, to prevent our taking

a serious action seriously, in short, in order to prepare us for

laughter, comedy utilises a method, the formula of which may be

given as follows: INSTEAD OF CONCENTRATING OUR ATTENTION ON ACTIONS,

COMEDY DIRECTS IT RATHER TO GESTURES. By GESTURES we here mean the

attitudes, the movements and even the language by which a mental

state expresses itself outwardly without any aim or profit, from no

other cause than a kind of inner itching. Gesture, thus defined, is

profoundly different from action. Action is intentional or, at any

rate, conscious; gesture slips out unawares, it is automatic. In

action, the entire person is engaged; in gesture, an isolated part

of the person is expressed, unknown to, or at least apart from, the

whole of the personality. Lastly—and here is the essential point—

action is in exact proportion to the feeling that inspires it: the

one gradually passes into the other, so that we may allow our

sympathy or our aversion to glide along the line running from

feeling to action and become increasingly interested. About gesture,

however, there is something explosive, which awakes our sensibility

when on the point of being lulled to sleep and, by thus rousing us

up, prevents our taking matters seriously. Thus, as soon as our

attention is fixed on gesture and not on action, we are in the realm

of comedy. Did we merely take his actions into account, Tartuffe

would belong to drama: it is only when we take his gestures into

consideration that we find him comic. You may remember how he comes

on to the stage with the words: “Laurent, lock up my hair-shirt and

my scourge.” He knows Dorine is listening to him, but doubtless he

would say the same if she were not there. He enters so thoroughly

into the role of a hypocrite that he plays it almost sincerely. In

this way, and this way only, can he become comic. Were it not for

this material sincerity, were it not for the language and attitudes

that his long-standing experience as a hypocrite has transformed

into natural gestures, Tartuffe would be simply odious, because we

should only think of what is meant and willed in his conduct. And so

we see why action is essential in drama, but only accessory in

comedy. In a comedy, we feel any other situation might equally well

have been chosen for the purpose of introducing the character; he

would still have been the same man though the situation were

different. But we do not get this impression in a drama. Here

characters and situations are welded together, or rather, events

form part and parcel with the persons, so that were the drama to

tell us a different story, even though the actors kept the same

names, we should in reality be dealing with other persons.

 

To sum up, whether a character is good or bad is of little moment:

granted he is unsociable, he is capable of becoming comic. We now

see that the seriousness of the case is of no importance either:

whether serious or trifling, it is still capable of making us laugh,

provided that care be taken not to arouse our emotions.

Unsociability in the performer and insensibility in the spectator—

such, in a word, are the two essential conditions. There is a third,

implicit in the other two, which so far it has been the aim of our

analysis to bring out.

 

This third condition is automatism. We have pointed it out from the

outset of this work, continually drawing attention to the following

point: what is essentially laughable is what is done automatically.

In a vice, even in a virtue, the comic is that element by which the

person unwittingly betrays himself—the involuntary gesture or the

unconscious remark. Absentmindedness is always comical. Indeed, the

deeper the absentmindedness the higher the comedy. Systematic

absentmindedness, like that of Don Quixote, is the most comical

thing imaginable: it is the comic itself, drawn as nearly as

possible from its very source. Take any other comic character:

however unconscious he may be of what he says or does, he cannot be

comical unless there be some aspect of his person of which he is

unaware, one side of his nature which he overlooks; on that account

alone does he make us laugh. [Footnote: When the humorist laughs at

himself, he is really acting a double part; the self who laughs is

indeed conscious, but not the self who is laughed at.] Profoundly

comic sayings are those artless ones in which some vice reveals

itself in all its nakedness: how could it thus expose itself were it

capable of seeing itself as it is? It is not uncommon for a comic

character to condemn in general terms a certain line of conduct and

immediately afterwards afford an example of it himself: for

instance, M. Jourdain’s teacher of philosophy flying into a passion

after inveighing against anger; Vadius taking a poem from his pocket

after heaping ridicule on readers of poetry, etc. What is the object

of such contradictions except to help us to put our finger on the

obliviousness of the characters to their own actions? Inattention to

self, and consequently to others, is what we invariably find. And if

we look at the matter closely, we see that inattention is here

equivalent to what we have called unsociability. The chief cause of

rigidity is the neglect to look around—and more especially within

oneself: how can a man fashion his personality after that of another

if he does not first study others as well as himself? Rigidity,

automatism, absentmindedness and unsociability are all inextricably

entwined; and all serve as ingredients to the making up of the comic

in character.

 

In a word, if we leave on one side, when dealing with human

personality, that portion which interests our sensibility or appeals

to our feeling, all the rest is capable of becoming comic, and the