Laughter by Henri Bergson (best way to read an ebook txt) 📖

the special character of this

strangeness arise? What is it that makes it laughable? To this

question, which we have already propounded in various forms, our

answer must always be the same. The rigid mechanism which we

occasionally detect, as a foreign body, in the living continuity of

human affairs is of peculiar interest to us as being a kind of

ABSENTMINDEDNESS on the part of life. Were events unceasingly

mindful of their own course, there would be no coincidences, no

conjunctures and no circular series; everything would evolve and

progress continuously. And were all men always attentive to life,

were we constantly keeping in touch with others as well as with

ourselves, nothing within us would ever appear as due to the working

of strings or springs. 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, of automatism, of movement without life. Consequently it

expresses an individual or collective imperfection which calls for

an immediate corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social

gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of

absentmindedness in men and in events.

 

But this in turn tempts us to make further investigations. So far,

we have spent our time in rediscovering, in the diversions of the

grownup man, those mechanical combinations which amused him as a

child. Our methods, in fact, have been entirely empirical. Let us

now attempt to frame a full and methodical theory, by seeking, as it

were, at the fountainhead, the changeless and simple archetypes of

the manifold and transient practices of the comic stage. Comedy, we

said, combines events so as to introduce mechanism into the outer

forms of life. Let us now ascertain in what essential

characteristics life, when viewed from without, seems to contrast

with mere mechanism. We shall only have, then, to turn to the

opposite characteristics, in order to discover the abstract formula,

this time a general and complete one, for every real and possible

method of comedy.

 

Life presents itself to us as evolution in time and complexity in

space. Regarded in time, it is the continuous evolution of a being

ever growing older; it never goes backwards and never repeats

anything. Considered in space, it exhibits certain coexisting

elements so closely interdependent, so exclusively made for one

another, that not one of them could, at the same time, belong to two

different organisms: each living being is a closed system of

phenomena, incapable of interfering with other systems. A continual

change of aspect, the irreversibility of the order of phenomena, the

perfect individuality of a perfectly self-contained series: such,

then, are the outward characteristics—whether real or apparent is

of little moment—which distinguish the living from the merely

mechanical. Let us take the counterpart of each of these: we shall

obtain three processes which might be called REPETITION, INVERSION,

and RECIPROCAL INTERFERENCE OF SERIES. Now, it is easy to see that

these are also the methods of light comedy, and that no others are

possible.

 

As a matter of fact, we could discover them, as ingredients of

varying importance, in the composition of all the scenes we have

just been considering, and, a fortiori, in the children’s games, the

mechanism of which they reproduce. The requisite analysis would,

however, delay us too long, and it is more profitable to study them

in their purity by taking fresh examples. Nothing could be easier,

for it is in their pure state that they are found both in classic

comedy and in contemporary plays.

 

1. REPETITION.-Our present problem no longer deals, like the

preceding one, with a word or a sentence repeated by an individual,

but rather with a situation, that is, a combination of

circumstances, which recurs several times in its original form and

thus contrasts with the changing stream of life. Everyday experience

supplies us with this type of the comic, though only in a

rudimentary state. Thus, you meet a friend in the street whom you

have not seen for an age; there is nothing comic in the situation.

If, however, you meet, him again the same day, and then a third and

a fourth time, you may laugh at the “coincidence.” Now, picture to

yourself a series of imaginary events which affords a tolerably fair

illusion of life, and within this ever-moving series imagine one and

the same scene reproduced either by the same characters or by

different ones: again you will have a coincidence, though a far more

extraordinary one.

 

Such are the repetitions produced on the stage. They are the more

laughable in proportion as the scene repeated is more complex and

more naturally introduced—two conditions which seem mutually

exclusive, and which the play-writer must be clever enough to

reconcile.

 

Contemporary light comedy employs this method in every shape and

form. One of the best-known examples consists in bringing a group of

characters, act after act, into the most varied surroundings, so as

to reproduce, under ever fresh circumstances, one and the same

series of incidents or accidents more or less symmetrically

identical.

 

In several of Moliere’s plays we find one and the same arrangement

of events repeated right through the comedy from beginning to end.

Thus, the Ecole des femmes does nothing more than reproduce and

repeat a single incident in three tempi: first tempo, Horace tells

Arnolphe of the plan he has devised to deceive Agnes’s guardian, who

turns out to be Arnolphe himself; second tempo, Arnolphe thinks he

has checkmated the move; third tempo, Agnes contrives that Horace

gets all the benefit of Arnolphe’s precautionary measures. There is

the same symmetrical repetition in the Ecole des marts, in

L’Etourdi, and above all in George Dandin, where the same effect in

three tempi is again met with: first tempo, George Dandin discovers

that his wife is unfaithful; second tempo, he summons his father—

and mother-in-law to his assistance; third tempo, it is George

Dandin himself, after all, who has to apologise.

 

At times the same scene is reproduced with groups of different

characters. Then it not infrequently happens that the first group

consists of masters and the second of servants. The latter repeat in

another key a scene already played by the former, though the

rendering is naturally less refined. A part of the Depit amoureux is

constructed on this plan, as is also Amphitryon. In an amusing

little comedy of Benedix, Der Eigensinn, the order is inverted: we

have the masters reproducing a scene of stubbornness in which their

servants have set the example.

 

But, quite irrespective of the characters who serve as pegs for the

arrangement of symmetrical situations, there seems to be a wide gulf

between classic comedy and the theatre of to-day. Both aim at

introducing a certain mathematical order into events, while none the

less maintaining their aspect of likelihood, that is to say, of

life. But the means they employ are different. The majority of light

comedies of our day seek to mesmerise directly the mind of the

spectator. For, however extraordinary the coincidence, it becomes

acceptable from the very fact that it is accepted; and we do accept

it, if we have been gradually prepared for its reception. Such is

often the procedure adopted by contemporary authors. In Moliere’s

plays, on the contrary, it is the moods of the persons on the stage,

not of the audience, that make repetition seem natural. Each of the

characters represents a certain force applied in a certain

direction, and it is because these forces, constant in direction,

necessarily combine together in the same way, that the same

situation is reproduced. Thus interpreted, the comedy of situation

is akin to the comedy of character. It deserves to be called

classic, if classic art is indeed that which does not claim to

derive from the effect more than it has put into the cause.

 

2. Inversion.—This second method has so much analogy with the first

that we will merely define it without insisting on illustrations.

Picture to yourself certain characters in a certain situation: if

you reverse the situation and invert the roles, you obtain a comic

scene. The double rescue scene in Le Voyage de M. Perrichon belongs

to this class. [Footnote: Labiche, “Le Voyage de M. Perrichon.”]

There is no necessity, however, for both the identical scenes to be

played before us. We may be shown only one, provided the other is

really in our minds. Thus, we laugh at the prisoner at the bar

lecturing the magistrate; at a child presuming to teach its parents;

in a word, at everything that comes under the heading of

“topsyturvydom.” Not infrequently comedy sets before us a character

who lays a trap in which he is the first to be caught. The plot of

the villain who is the victim of his own villainy, or the cheat

cheated, forms the stock-in-trade of a good many plays. We find this

even in primitive farce. Lawyer Pathelin tells his client of a trick

to outwit the magistrate; the client employs the self-same trick to

avoid paying the lawyer. A termagant of a wife insists upon her

husband doing all the housework; she has put down each separate item

on a “rota.” Now let her fall into a copper, her husband will refuse

to drag her out, for “that is not down on his ‘rota.’” In modern

literature we meet with hundreds of variations on the theme of the

robber robbed. In every case the root idea involves an inversion of

roles, and a situation which recoils on the head of its author.

 

Here we apparently find the confirmation of a law, some

illustrations of which we have already pointed out. When a comic

scene has been reproduced a number of times, it reaches the stage of

being a classical type or model. It becomes amusing in itself, quite

apart from the causes which render it amusing. Henceforth, new

scenes, which are not comic de jure, may become amusing de facto, on

account of their partial resemblance to this model. They call up in

our mind a more or less confused image which we know to be comical.

They range themselves in a category representing an officially

recognised type of the comic. The scene of the “robber robbed”

belongs to this class. It casts over a host of other scenes a

reflection of the comic element it contains. In the end it renders

comic any mishap that befalls one through one’s own fault, no matter

what the fault or mishap may be,—nay, an allusion to this mishap, a

single word that recalls it, is sufficient. There would be nothing

amusing in the saying, “It serves you right, George Dandin,” were it

not for the comic overtones that take up and re-echo it.

 

3. We have dwelt at considerable length on repetition and inversion;

we now come to the reciprocal interference [Footnote: The word

“interference” has here the meaning given to it in Optics, where it

indicates the partial superposition and neutralisation, by each

other, of two series of light-waves.] of series. This is a comic

effect, the precise formula of which is very difficult to

disentangle, by reason of the extraordinary variety of forms in

which it appears on the stage. Perhaps it might be defined as

follows: A situation is invariably comic when it belongs

simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is

capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at

the same time.

 

You will at once think of an equivocal situation. And the equivocal

situation is indeed one which permits of two different meanings at

the same time, the one merely plausible, which is put forward by the

actors, the other a real one, which is given by the public. We see

the real meaning of the situation, because care has been taken to

show us every