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

CHAPTER II

THE COMIC ELEMENT IN SITUATIONS AND THE COMIC ELEMENT IN WORDS

I

We have studied the comic element in forms, in attitudes, and in

movements generally; now let us look for it in actions and in

situations. We encounter, indeed, this kind of comic readily enough

in everyday life. It is not here, however, that it best lends itself

to analysis. Assuming that the stage is both a magnified and a

simplified view of life, we shall find that comedy is capable of

furnishing us with more information than real life on this

particular part of our subject. Perhaps we ought even to carry

simplification still farther, and, going back to our earliest

recollections, try to discover, in the games that amused us as

children, the first faint traces of the combinations that make us

laugh as grownup persons. We are too apt to speak of our feelings

of pleasure and of pain as though full grown at birth, as though

each one of them had not a history of its own. Above all, we are too

apt to ignore the childish element, so to speak, latent in most of

our joyful emotions. And yet, how many of our present pleasures,

were we to examine them closely, would shrink into nothing more than

memories of past ones! What would there be left of many of our

emotions were we to reduce them to the exact quantum of pure feeling

they contain, by subtracting from them all that is merely

reminiscence? Indeed, it seems possible that, after a certain age,

we become impervious to all fresh or novel forms of joy, and the

sweetest pleasures of the middle-aged man are perhaps nothing more

than a revival of the sensations of childhood, a balmy zephyr wafted

in fainter and fainter breaths by a past that is ever receding. In

any case, whatever reply we give to this broad question, one thing

is certain: there can be no break in continuity between the child’s

delight in games and that of the grownup person. Now, comedy is a

game, a game that imitates life. And since, in the games of the

child when working its dolls and puppets, many of the movements are

produced by strings, ought we not to find those same strings,

somewhat frayed by wear, reappearing as the threads that knot

together the situations in a comedy? Let us, then, start with the

games of a child, and follow the imperceptible process by which, as

he grows himself, he makes his puppets grow, inspires them with

life, and finally brings them to an ambiguous state in which,

without ceasing to be puppets, they have yet become human beings. We

thus obtain characters of a comedy type. And upon them we can test

the truth of the law of which all our preceding analyses gave an

inkling, a law in accordance with which we will define all broadly

comic situations in general. ANY ARRANGEMENT OF ACTS AND EVENTS IS

COMIC WHICH GIVES US, IN A SINGLE COMBINATION, THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

AND THE DISTINCT 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, and he shoots up still higher. Crush

him down beneath the lid, and often he will send everything flying.

It is hard to tell whether or no the toy itself is very ancient, but

the kind of amusement it affords belongs to all time. It is a

struggle between two stubborn elements, one of which, being simply

mechanical, generally ends by giving in to the other, which treats

it as a plaything. A cat playing with a mouse, which from time to

time she releases like a spring, only to pull it up short with a

stroke of her paw, indulges in the same kind of amusement.

 

We will now pass on to the theatre, beginning with a Punch and Judy

show. No sooner does the policeman put in an appearance on the stage

than, naturally enough, he receives a blow which fells him. He

springs to his feet, a second blow lays him flat. A repetition of

the offence is followed by a repetition of the punishment. Up and

down the constable flops and hops with the uniform rhythm of the

bending and release of a spring, whilst the spectators laugh louder

and louder.

 

Now, let us think of a spring that is rather of a moral type, an

idea that is first expressed, then repressed, and then expressed

again; a stream of words that bursts forth, is checked, and keeps on

starting afresh. Once more we have the vision of one stubborn force,

counteracted by another, equally pertinacious. This vision, however,

will have discarded a portion of its materiality. No longer is it

Punch and Judy that we are watching, but rather a real comedy.

 

Many a comic scene may indeed be referred to this simple type. For

instance, in the scene of the Mariage force between Sganarelle and

Pancrace, the entire vis comica lies in the conflict set up between

the idea of Sganarelle, who wishes to make the philosopher listen to

him, and the obstinacy of the philosopher, a regular talking-machine

working automatically. As the scene progresses, the image of the

Jack-in-the-box becomes more apparent, so that at last the

characters themselves adopt its movements,—Sganarelle pushing

Pancrace, each time he shows himself, back into the wings, Pancrace

returning to the stage after each repulse to continue his patter.

And when Sganarelle finally drives Pancrace back and shuts him up

inside the house—inside the box, one is tempted to say—a window

suddenly flies open, and the head of the philosopher again appears

as though it had burst open the lid of a box.

 

The same by-play occurs in the Malade Imaginaire. Through the mouth

of Monsieur Purgon the outraged medical profession pours out its

vials of wrath upon Argan, threatening him with every disease that

flesh is heir to. And every time Argan rises from his seat, as

though to silence Purgon, the latter disappears for a moment, being,

as it were, thrust back into the wings; then, as though Impelled by

a spring, he rebounds on to the stage with a fresh curse on his

lips. The self-same exclamation: “Monsieur Purgon!” recurs at

regular beats, and, as it were, marks the TEMPO of this little

scene.

 

Let us scrutinise more closely the image of the spring which is

bent, released, and bent again. Let us disentangle its central

element, and we shall hit upon one of the usual processes of classic

comedy,—REPETITION.

 

Why is it there is something comic in the repetition of a word on

the stage? No theory of the ludicrous seems to offer a satisfactory

answer to this very simple question. Nor can an answer be found so

long as we look for the explanation of an amusing word or phrase in

the phrase or word itself, apart from all it suggests to us. Nowhere

will the usual method prove to be so inadequate as here. With the

exception, however, of a few special instances to which we shall

recur later, the repetition of a word is never laughable in itself.

It makes us laugh only because it symbolises a special play of moral

elements, this play itself being the symbol of an altogether

material diversion. It is the diversion of the cat with the mouse,

the diversion of the child pushing back the Jack-in-the-box, time

after time, to the bottom of his box,—but in a refined and

spiritualised form, transferred to the realm of feelings and ideas.

Let us then state the law which, we think, defines the main comic

varieties of word-repetition on the stage: IN A COMIC REPETITION OF

WORDS WE GENERALLY FIND TWO TERMS: A REPRESSED FEELING WHICH GOES

OFF LIKE A SPRING, AND AN IDEA THAT DELIGHTS IN REPRESSING THE

FEELING ANEW.

 

When Dorine is telling Orgon of his wife’s illness, and the latter

continually interrupts him with inquiries as to the health of

Tartuffe, the question: “Et tartuffe?” repeated every few moments,

affords us the distinct sensation of a spring being released. This

spring Dorine delights in pushing back, each time she resumes her

account of Elmire’s illness. And when Scapin informs old Geronte

that his son has been taken prisoner on the famous galley, and that

a ransom must be paid without delay, he is playing with the avarice

of Geronte exactly as Dorine does with the infatuation of Orgon. The

old man’s avarice is no sooner repressed than up it springs again

automatically, and it is this automatism that Moliere tries to

indicate by the mechanical repetition of a sentence expressing

regret at the money that would have to be forthcoming: “What the

deuce did he want in that galley?” The same criticism is applicable

to the scene in which Valere points out to Harpagon the wrong he

would be doing in marrying his daughter to a man she did not love.

“No dowry wanted!” interrupts the miserly Harpagon every few

moments. Behind this exclamation, which recurs automatically, we

faintly discern a complete repeating-machine set going by a fixed

idea.

 

At times this mechanism is less easy to detect, and here we

encounter a fresh difficulty in the theory of the comic. Sometimes

the whole interest of a scene lies in one character playing a double

part, the intervening speaker acting as a mere prism, so to speak,

through which the dual personality is developed. We run the risk,

then, of going astray if we look for the secret of the effect in

what we see and hear,—in the external scene played by the

characters,—and not in the altogether inner comedy of which this

scene is no more than the outer refraction. For instance, when

Alceste stubbornly repeats the words, “I don’t say that!” on Oronte

asking him if he thinks his poetry bad, the repetition is laughable,

though evidently Oronte is not now playing with Alceste at the game

we have just described. We must be careful, however, for, in

reality, we have two men in Alceste: on the one hand, the

“misanthropist” who has vowed henceforth to call a spade a spade,

and on the other the gentleman who cannot unlearn, in a trice, the

usual forms of politeness, or even, it may be, just the honest

fellow who, when called upon to put his words into practice, shrinks

from wounding another’s self-esteem or hurting his feelings.

Accordingly, the real scene is not between Alceste and Oronte, it is

between Alceste and himself. The one Alceste would fain blurt out

the truth, and the other stops his mouth just as he is on the point

of telling everything. Each “I don’t say that!” reveals a growing

effort to repress something that strives and struggles to get out.

And so the tone in which the phrase is uttered gets more and more

violent, Alceste becoming more and more angry—not with Oronte. as

he thinks—but with himself. The tension of the spring is

continually being renewed and reinforced until it at last goes off

with a bang. Here, as elsewhere, we have the same identical

mechanism of repetition.

 

For a man to make a resolution never henceforth to say what he does

not think, even though he “openly defy the whole human race,” is not

necessarily laughable; it is only a phase of life at its highest and

best. For another man, through amiability, selfishness, or disdain,

to prefer to flatter people is only another phase of life; there is

nothing in it to make us laugh. You may even combine these two men

into one, and arrange that the individual waver