Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
Laughter
We laugh at "the mechanical encrusted upon the living" — laughter is the social corrective for inflexibility
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Laughter (Early-mature (between Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution)) |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Non-Deterministic |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Emergent |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Partial |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | None |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Experience |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Continuous |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
Laughter
The temporal contrast: living adaptation is continuous becoming, the mechanical is repetition — laughter exposes the freezing of duration into automatism.
Space
Laughter
The body as the immediate site of comic deviation — the comic body slips, repeats, mechanises in ways the living body should not.
Matter
Laughter
Material rigidity (the puppet, the machine) is the comic's emblem of what life ought not to become.
Observer
Laughter
The social spectator whose laughter enforces flexibility — laughter requires audience.
Energy
Laughter
The energies of social pressure that laughter mobilises against deviation.
Information
Laughter
The pattern of recognition by which the comic deviation is identified as mechanical against the living norm.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
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.