Work #914 · Early-mature (between Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution) period

Laughter

Bergson's 1900 short essay on the comic — laughter as a social corrective applied to the mechanical encrustation on the living

Henri Bergson · 1900 (Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique, Revue de Paris; book edition 1900; revised many times through 1924) · French · Philosophical essay

Tradition: French process philosophy / philosophy of aesthetics

We laugh at "the mechanical encrusted upon the living" — laughter is the social corrective for inflexibility

Bergson's 1900 essay developed a comprehensive theory of the comic from a single thesis: we laugh when we perceive something mechanical, automatic, rigid, or repetitive in what should be supple, living, and adaptive — "du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant" (the mechanical encrusted upon the living). The man who slips on a banana skin, the absent-minded professor, the puppet-like character of farce, the rigid mannerism — all instance a deviation from the suppleness life requires, and laughter is the social corrective that punishes such deviation. The essay applies this thesis to comic situations, comic characters, comic words, and comic art, showing how a wide range of comic phenomena reduce to variations on the central pattern. Foundational text in twentieth-century aesthetics of humour, and an important early statement of the durée-and-élan framework before Creative Evolution made it explicit.

Author

Henri Bergson

Editions cited

Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (Revue de Paris, 1900; book Alcan, 1900; revised through 23rd edn 1924); English trans. Cloudesley Brereton & Fred Rothwell, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Macmillan, 1911)

Compare this work

School Embodiments

Process Philosophy · 25%

Naturalism · 20%

Phenomenology · 15%

Pragmatism · 10%

Realism · 10%

Idealism · 5%

Process Philosophy 25%

The book is a sustained illustration of the durée framework: life is suppleness, adaptation, continuous becoming; the mechanical is its frozen negation; laughter exposes the freezing.

"The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine." (Laughter, ch. 1)

Naturalism 20%

The social function of laughter — its role as evolutionary-social corrective enforcing flexibility — is treated naturalistically, as an adaptation of the species.

"Laughter must be something of this kind, a sort of social gesture. By the fear which it inspires, it restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into their shell and go to sleep." (Laughter, ch. 1)

Phenomenology 15%

Close descriptive attention to the comic phenomena themselves — slapstick, the comic character, the wordplay — gives the essay its phenomenological-aesthetic character.

"To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all we must determine the utility of its function, which is a social one." (Laughter, ch. 1)

Pragmatism 10%

The functional account — laughter as a tool the species uses to enforce social adaptation — is pragmatist in shape, treating mental and social phenomena in terms of their work.

"Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed." (Laughter, ch. 3)

Realism 10%

The book is realist about social function: laughter does something in the social world, it is not a mere private affect.

"By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it." (Laughter, ch. 3)

Idealism 5%

The "spirit" or "soul" that comic deviation betrays into mechanism is closer to an idealist than to a materialist anthropology.

"The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism." (Laughter, ch. 2)

Internal Tensions

Bergson's theory captures slapstick and the comedy of inflexibility well, but fits less well to wit, irony, satire, or the comedy of recognition. Twentieth-century theorists (Freud, Bakhtin, Frye) added incongruity-, relief-, and carnival-theories of the comic that Laughter does not subsume. The "social corrective" framing also raises the question — pressed by feminist and postcolonial critics — about who counts as the laughing community and whose deviation is being punished.

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I. Time

The temporal contrast: living adaptation is continuous becoming, the mechanical is repetition — laughter exposes the freezing of duration into automatism.

Attributes

Extent: Infinite Ontological Status: Substantival Grain: Continuous Freedom: Non-Deterministic Traversability: Linear Direction: Uni-directional Dimensionality: One

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II. Space

The body as the immediate site of comic deviation — the comic body slips, repeats, mechanises in ways the living body should not.

Attributes

Extent: Infinite Ontological Status: Substantival Curvature: Flat Dimensionality: Three Locality: Local

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III. Matter

Material rigidity (the puppet, the machine) is the comic's emblem of what life ought not to become.

Attributes

Extent: Infinite Ontological Status: Emergent Conservation: Conserved Dimensionality: Three Locality: Local

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IV. Observer

The social spectator whose laughter enforces flexibility — laughter requires audience.

Attributes

Time Instance: Single Space Instance: Single Knowledge Extent: Partial Knowledge Retainment: Total Physicality: Embodied Agency: Active Number: Plural Metaphysical Agency: None

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V. Energy

The energies of social pressure that laughter mobilises against deviation.

Attributes

Extent: Infinite Ontological Status: Substantival Conservation: Conserved Dispersibility: Irreversible

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VI. Information

The pattern of recognition by which the comic deviation is identified as mechanical against the living norm.

Attributes

Ontological Status: Substantival Cosmic Conservation: Conserved Personal Conservation: Conserved Granularity: Continuous

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LDS / Latter-day Saint Theology