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

THE COMIC IN GENERAL—THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS AND MOVEMENTS—

EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC.

What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable?

What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and

a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us

invariably the same essence from which so many different products

borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The

greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this

little problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of

slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge

flung at philosophic speculation. Our excuse for attacking the

problem in our turn must lie in the fact that we shall not aim at

imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it,

above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall

treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine ourselves to

watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible gradations

from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the strangest

metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybe we may

gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that, something

more flexible than an abstract definition,—a practical, intimate

acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship. And maybe

we may also find that, unintentionally, we have made an acquaintance

that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in

its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness. It

dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are

at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group. Can

it then fail to throw light for us on the way that human imagination

works, and more particularly social, collective, and popular

imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not

also have something of its own to tell us about art and life?

At the outset we shall put forward three observations which we look

upon as fundamental. They have less bearing on the actually comic

than on the field within which it must be sought.

The first point to which attention should be called is that the

comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A

landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant

and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal,

but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or

expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of,

in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that

men have given it,—the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It

is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has

not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers.

Several have defined man as “an animal which laughs.” They might

equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for

if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same

effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the

stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the

ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as

though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it

fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm

and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter

has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not

laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even

with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our

affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a

society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no

more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas

highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every

event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither

know nor understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to become

interested in everything that is being said and done; act, in

imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a

word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the

touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume

importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now step aside,

look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn

into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the sound of

music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers at once

to appear ridiculous. How many human actions would stand a similar

test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to

gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To

produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something

like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to

intelligence, pure and simple.

This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other

intelligences. And here is the third fact to which attention should

be drawn. You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself

isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo,

Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined

sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by

reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash,

to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain.

Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel

within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the

less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

It may, perchance, have happened to you, when seated in a railway

carriage or at table d’hote, to hear travellers relating to one

another stories which must have been comic to them, for they laughed

heartily. Had you been one of their company, you would have laughed

like them; but, as you were not, you had no desire whatever to do

so. A man who was once asked why he did not weep at a sermon, when

everybody else was shedding tears, replied: “I don’t belong to the

parish!” What that man thought of tears would be still more true of

laughter. However spontaneous