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

CHAPTER III THE COMIC IN CHARACTER I

We have followed the comic along many of its winding channels in an

endeavour to discover how it percolates into a form, an attitude, or

a gesture; a situation, an action, or an expression. The analysis of

comic CHARACTERS has now brought us to the most important part of

our task. It would also be the most difficult, had we yielded to the

temptation of defining the laughable by a few striking—and

consequently obvious—examples; for then, in proportion as we

advanced towards the loftiest manifestations of the comic, we should

have found the facts slipping between the over-wide meshes of the

definition intended to retain them. But, as a matter of fact, we

have followed the opposite plan, by throwing light on the subject

from above. Convinced that laughter has a social meaning and import,

that the comic expresses, above all else, a special lack of

adaptability to society, and that, in short, there is nothing comic

apart from man, we have made man and character generally our main

objective. Our chief difficulty, therefore, has lain in explaining

how we come to laugh at anything else than character, and by what

subtle processes of fertilisation, combination or amalgamation, the

comic can worm its way into a mere movement, an impersonal

situation, or an independent phrase. This is what we have done so

far. We started with the pure metal, and all our endeavours have

been directed solely towards reconstructing the ore. It is the metal

itself we are now about to study. Nothing could be easier, for this

time we have a simple element to deal with. Let us examine it

closely and see how it reacts upon everything else.

 

There are moods, we said, which move us as soon us as soon as we

perceive them, joys and sorrows with which we sympathise, passions

and vices which call forth painful astonishment, terror or pity, in

the beholder; in short, sentiments that are prolonged in sentimental

overtones from mind to mind. All this concerns the essentials of

life. All this is serious, at times even tragic. Comedy can only

begin at the point where our neighbour’s personality ceases to

affect us. It begins, in fact, with what might be called a growing

callousness to social life. Any individual is comic who

automatically goes his own way without troubling himself about

getting into touch with the rest of his fellow-beings. It is the

part of laughter to reprove his absentmindedness and wake him out of

his dream. If it is permissible to compare important things with

trivial ones, we would call to mind what happens when a youth enters

one of our military academies. After getting through the dreaded

ordeal of the examination, he finds the has other ordeals to face,

which his seniors have arranged with the object of fitting him for

the new life he is entering upon, or, as they say, of “breaking him

into harness.” Every small society that forms within the larger is

thus impelled, by a vague kind of instinct, to devise some method of

discipline or “breaking in,” so as to deal with the rigidity of

habits that have been formed elsewhere and have now to undergo a

partial modification. Society, properly so-called, proceeds in

exactly the same way. Each member must be ever attentive to his

social surroundings; he must model himself on his environment; in

short, he must avoid shutting himself up in his own peculiar

character as a philosopher in his ivory tower. Therefore society

holds suspended over each individual member, if not the threat of

correction, at all events the prospect of a snubbing, which,

although it is slight, is none the less dreaded. Such must be the

function of laughter. Always rather humiliating for the one against

whom it is directed, laughter is, really and truly, a kind of social

“ragging.”

 

Hence the equivocal nature of the comic. It belongs neither

altogether to art nor altogether to life. On the one hand,

characters in real life would never make us laugh were we not

capable of watching their vagaries in the same way as we look down

at a play from our seat in a box; they are only comic in our eyes

because they perform a kind of comedy before us. But, on the other

hand, the pleasure caused by laughter, even on the stage, is not an

unadulterated enjoyment; it is not a pleasure that is exclusively

esthetic or altogether disinterested. It always implies a secret or

unconscious intent, if not of each one of us, at all events of

society as a whole. In laughter we always find an unavowed intention

to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbour, if not in

his will, at least in his deed. This is the reason a comedy is far

more like real life than a drama is. The more sublime the drama, the

more profound the analysis to which the poet has had to subject the

raw materials of daily life in order to obtain the tragic element in

its unadulterated form. On the contrary, it is only in its lower

aspects, in light comedy and farce, that comedy is in striking

contrast to reality: the higher it rises, the more it approximates

to life; in fact, there are scenes in real life so closely bordering

on high-class comedy that the stage might adopt them without

changing a single word.

 

Hence it follows that the elements of comic character on the stage

and in actual life will be the same. What are these elements? We

shall find no difficulty in deducing them. It has often been said

that it is the TRIFLING faults of our fellow-men that make us laugh.

 

Evidently there is a considerable amount of truth in this opinion;

still, it cannot be regarded as altogether correct. First, as

regards faults, it is no easy matter to draw the line between the

trifling and the serious; maybe it is not because a fault is

trifling that it makes us laugh, but rather because it makes us

laugh that we regard it as trifling, for there is nothing disarms us

like laughter. But we may go even farther, and maintain that there

are faults at which we laugh, even though fully aware that they are

serious,—Harpagon’s avarice, for instance. And then, we may as well

confess—though somewhat reluctantly—that we laugh not only at the

faults of our fellow-men, but also, at times, at their good

qualities. We laugh at Alceste. The objection may be urged that it

is not the earnestness of Alceste that is ludicrous, but rather the

special aspect which earnestness assumes in his case, and, in short,

a certain eccentricity that mars it in our eyes. Agreed; but it is

none the less true that this eccentricity in Alceste, at which we

laugh, MAKES HIS EARNESTNESS LAUGHABLE, and that is the main point.

So we may conclude that the ludicrous is not always an indication of

a fault, in the moral meaning of the word, and if critics insist on

seeing a fault, even though a trifling one, in the ludicrous, they

must point out what it is here that exactly distinguishes the

trifling from the serious.

 

The truth is, the comic character may, strictly speaking, be quite

in accord with stern morality. All it has to do is to bring itself

into accord with society. The character of Alceste is that of a

thoroughly honest man. But then he is unsociable, and, on that very

account,