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

it seems, laughter always implies a

kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers,

real or imaginary. How often has it been said that the fuller the

theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience! On the

other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comic

effects are incapable of translation from one language to another,

because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social

group! It is through not understanding the importance of this double

fact that the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity in

which the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange,

isolated phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human

activity. Hence those definitions which tend to make the comic into

an abstract relation between ideas: “an intellectual contrast,” “a

palpable absurdity,” etc.,—definitions which, even were they really

suitable to every form of the comic, would not in the least explain

why the comic makes us laugh. How, indeed, should it come about that

this particular logical relation, as soon as it is perceived,

contracts, expands and shakes our limbs, whilst all other relations

leave the body unaffected? It is not from this point of view that we

shall approach the problem. To understand laughter, we must put it

back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all

must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social

one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our

investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life

in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification.

 

Let us clearly mark the point towards which our three preliminary

observations are converging. The comic will come into being, it

appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one

of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into

play nothing but their intelligence. What, now, is the particular

point on which their attention will have to be concentrated, and

what will here be the function of intelligence? To reply to these

questions will be at once to come to closer grips with the problem.

But here a few examples have become indispensable.

II

A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by

burst out laughing. They would not laugh at him, I imagine, could

they suppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on

the ground. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary.

 

Consequently, it is not his sudden change of attitude that raises a

laugh, but rather the involuntary element in this change,—his

clumsiness, in fact. Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He

should have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle. Instead of

that, through lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a

kind of physical obstinacy, AS A RESULT, IN FACT, OF RIGIDITY OR OF

MOMENTUM, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when

the circumstances of the case called for something else. That is the

reason of the man’s fall, and also of the people’s laughter.

 

Now, take the case of a person who attends to the petty occupations

of his everyday life with mathematical precision. The objects around

him, however, have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the

result being that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it

out all covered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a

solid chair he finds himself sprawling on the floor, in a word his

actions are all topsyturvy or mere beating the air, while in every

case the effect is invariably one of momentum. Habit has given the

impulse: what was wanted was to check the movement or deflect it. He

did nothing of the sort, but continued like a machine in the same

straight line. The victim, then, of a practical joke is in a

position similar to that of a runner who falls,—he is comic for the

same reason. The laughable element in both cases consists of a

certain MECHANICAL INELASTICITY, just where one would expect to find

the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human

being. The only difference in the two cases is that the former

happened of itself, whilst the latter was obtained artificially. In

the first instance, the passer-by does nothing but look on, but in

the second the mischievous wag intervenes.

 

All the same, in both cases the result has been brought about by an

external circumstance. The comic is therefore accidental: it

remains, so to speak, in superficial contact with the person. How is

it to penetrate within? The necessary conditions will be fulfilled

when mechanical rigidity no longer requires for its manifestation a

stumbling-block which either the hazard of circumstance or human

knavery has set in its way, but extracts by natural processes, from

its own store, an inexhaustible series of opportunities for

externally revealing its presence. Suppose, then, we imagine a mind

always thinking of what it has just done and never of what it is

doing, like a song which lags behind its accompaniment. Let us try

to picture to ourselves a certain inborn lack of elasticity of both

senses and intelligence, which brings it to pass that we continue to

see what is no longer visible, to hear what is no longer audible, to

say what is no longer to the point: in short, to adapt ourselves to

a past and therefore imaginary situation, when we ought to be

shaping our conduct in accordance with the reality which is present.

This time the comic will take up its abode in the person himself; it

is the person who will supply it with everything—matter and form,

cause and opportunity. Is it then surprising that the absentminded

individual—for this is the character we have just been describing—

has usually fired the imagination of comic authors? When La Bruyere

came across this particular type, he realised, on analysing it, that

he had got hold of a recipe for the wholesale manufacture of comic

effects. As a matter of fact he overdid it, and gave us far too

lengthy and detailed a description of Menalque, coming back to his

subject, dwelling and expatiating on it beyond all bounds. The very

facility of the subject fascinated him. Absentmindedness, indeed, is

not perhaps the actual fountainhead of the comic, but surely it is

contiguous to a certain stream of facts and fancies which flows

straight from the fountainhead. It is situated, so to say, on one

of the great natural watersheds of laughter.

 

Now, the effect of absentmindedness may gather strength in its turn.

There is a general law, the first example of which we have just

encountered, and which we will formulate in the following terms:

when a certain comic effect has its origin in a certain cause, the

more natural we regard the cause to be, the more comic shall we find

the effect. Even now we laugh at absentmindedness when presented to

us as a simple fact. Still more laughable will be the

absentmindedness we have seen springing up and growing before our

very eyes, with whose origin we are acquainted and whose life-history we can reconstruct. To choose a definite example: suppose a

man has taken to reading nothing but romances of love and chivalry.

Attracted and fascinated by his heroes, his thoughts and intentions

gradually turn more and more towards them, till one fine day we find

him walking among us like a somnambulist. His actions are

distractions. But then his distractions can be traced back to a

definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of ABSENCE of

mind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the PRESENCE

of the individual in quite definite, though imaginary, surroundings.

Doubtless a fall is always a fall, but it is one thing to tumble

into a well because you were looking anywhere but in front of you,

it is quite another thing to fall into it because you were intent

upon a star. It was certainly a star at which Don Quixote was

gazing. How profound is the comic element in the over-romantic,

Utopian bent of mind! And yet, if you reintroduce the idea of

absentmindedness, which acts as a go-between, you will see this

profound comic element uniting with the most superficial type. Yes,

indeed, these whimsical wild enthusiasts, these madmen who are yet

so strangely reasonable, excite us to laughter by playing on the

same chords within ourselves, by setting in motion the same inner

mechanism, as does the victim of a practical joke or the passer-by

who slips down in the street. They, too, are runners who fall and

simple souls who are being hoaxed—runners after the ideal who

stumble over realities, child-like dreamers for whom life delights

to lie in wait. But, above all, they are past-masters in

absentmindedness, with this superiority over their fellows that

their absentmindedness is systematic and organised around one

central idea, and that their mishaps are also quite coherent, thanks

to the inexorable logic which reality applies to the correction of

dreams, so that they kindle in those around them, by a series of

cumulative effects, a hilarity capable of unlimited expansion.

 

Now, let us go a little further. Might not certain vices have the

same relation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea has to

intellect? Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to the

will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature of the soul.

Doubtless there are vices into which the soul plunges deeply with

all its pregnant potency, which it rejuvenates and drags along with

it into a moving circle of reincarnations. Those are tragic vices.

But the vice capable of making us comic is, on the contrary, that

which is brought from without, like a ready-made frame into which we

are to step. It lends us its own rigidity instead of borrowing from

us our flexibility. We do not render it more complicated; on the

contrary, it simplifies us. Here, as we shall see later on in the

concluding section of this study, lies the essential difference

between comedy and drama. A drama, even when portraying passions or

vices that bear a name, so completely incorporates them in the

person that their names are forgotten, their general characteristics

effaced, and we no longer think of them at all, but rather of the

person in whom they are assimilated; hence, the title of a drama can

seldom be anything else than a proper noun. On the other hand, many

comedies have a common noun as their title: l’Avare, le Joueur, etc.

Were you asked to think of a play capable of being called le Jaloux,

for instance, you would find that Sganarelle or George Dandin would

occur to your mind, but not Othello: le Jaloux could only be the

title of a comedy. The reason is that, however intimately vice, when

comic, is associated with persons, it none the less retains its

simple, independent existence, it remains the central character,

present though invisible, to which the characters in flesh and blood

on the stage are attached. At times it delights in dragging them

down with its own weight and making them share in its tumbles. More

frequently, however, it plays on them as on an instrument or pulls

the strings as though they were puppets. Look closely: you will find

that the art of the comic poet consists in making us so well

acquainted with the particular vice, in introducing us, the

spectators, to such a degree of intimacy with it, that in the end we

get hold of some of the strings of the marionette with which he is

playing, and actually work them ourselves; this it is that explains

part of the pleasure we feel. Here, too, it is really a kind of

automatism that makes us laugh—an automatism, as we