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

touch of the

diabolical, raises up the demon who had been overthrown by the

angel. Certainly, it is an art that exaggerates, and yet the

definition would be very far from complete were exaggeration alone

alleged to be its aim and object, for there exist caricatures that

are more lifelike than portraits, caricatures in which the

exaggeration is scarcely noticeable, whilst, inversely, it is quite

possible to exaggerate to excess without obtaining a real

caricature. For exaggeration to be comic, it must not appear as an

aim, but rather as a means that the artist is using in order to make

manifest to our eyes the distortions which he sees in embryo. It is

this process of distortion that is of moment and interest. And that

is precisely why we shall look for it even in those elements of the

face that are incapable of movement, in the curve of a nose or the

shape of an ear. For, in our eyes, form is always the outline of a

movement. The caricaturist who alters the size of a nose, but

respects its ground plan, lengthening it, for instance, in the very

direction in which it was being lengthened by nature, is really

making the nose indulge in a grin. Henceforth we shall always look

upon the original as having determined to lengthen itself and start

grinning. In this sense, one might say that Nature herself often

meets with the successes of a caricaturist. In the movement through

which she has slit that mouth, curtailed that chin and bulged out

that cheek, she would appear to have succeeded in completing the

intended grimace, thus outwitting the restraining supervision of a

more reasonable force. In that case, the face we laugh at is, so to

speak, its own caricature.

 

To sum up, whatever be the doctrine to which our reason assents, our

imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every

human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a

soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject

to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it.

This soul imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it

animates: the immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is

called gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It

draws to itself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle,

would fain convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to

mere automatism. It would fain immobilise the intelligently varied

movements of the body in stupidly contracted grooves, stereotype in

permanent grimaces the fleeting expressions of the face, in short

imprint on the whole person such an attitude as to make it appear

immersed and absorbed in the materiality of some mechanical

occupation instead of ceaselessly renewing its vitality by keeping

in touch with a living ideal. Where matter thus succeeds in dulling

the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and

thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the body,

an effect that is comic. If, then, at this point we wished to define

the comic by comparing it with its contrary, we should have to

contrast it with gracefulness even more than with beauty. It

partakes rather of the unsprightly than of the unsightly, of

RIGIDNESS rather than of UGLINESS.

IV

We will now pass from the comic element in FORMS to that in GESTURES

and MOVEMENTS. Let us at once state the law which seems to govern

all the phenomena of this kind. It may indeed be deduced without any

difficulty from the considerations stated above. THE ATTITUDES,

GESTURES AND MOVEMENTS OF THE HUMAN BODY ARE LAUGHABLE IN EXACT

PROPORTION AS THAT BODY REMINDS US OF A MERE MACHINE. There is no

need to follow this law through the details of its immediate

applications, which are innumerable. To verify it directly, it would

be sufficient to study closely the work of comic artists,

eliminating entirely the element of caricature, and omitting that

portion of the comic which is not inherent in the drawing itself.

For, obviously, the comic element in a drawing is often a borrowed

one, for which the text supplies all the stock-in-trade. I mean that

the artist may be his own understudy in the shape of a satirist, or

even a playwright, and that then we laugh far less at the drawings

themselves than at the satire or comic incident they represent. But

if we devote our whole attention to the drawing with the firm

resolve to think of nothing else, we shall probably find that it is

generally comic in proportion to the clearness, as well as the

subtleness, with which it enables us to see a man as a jointed

puppet. The suggestion must be a clear one, for inside the person we

must distinctly perceive, as though through a glass, a set-up

mechanism. But the suggestion must also be a subtle one, for the

general appearance of the person, whose every limb has been made

rigid as a machine, must continue to give us the impression of a

living being. The more exactly these two images, that of a person

and that of a machine, fit into each other, the more striking is the

comic effect, and the more consummate the art of the draughtsman.

The originality of a comic artist is thus expressed in the special

kind of life he imparts to a mere puppet.

 

We will, however, leave on one side the immediate application of the

principle, and at this point insist only on the more remote

consequences. The illusion of a machine working in the inside of the

person is a thing that only crops up amid a host of amusing effects;

but for the most part it is a fleeting glimpse, that is immediately

lost in the laughter it provokes. To render it permanent, analysis

and reflection must be called into play.

 

In a public speaker, for instance, we find that gesture vies with

speech. Jealous of the latter, gesture closely dogs the speaker’s

thought, demanding also to act as interpreter. Well and good; but

then it must pledge itself to follow thought through all the phases

of its development. An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms

and ripens from the beginning to the end of a speech. It never

halts, never repeats itself. It must be changing every moment, for

to cease to change would be to cease to live. Then let gesture

display a like animation! Let it accept the fundamental law of life,

which is the complete negation of repetition! But I find that a

certain movement of head or arm, a movement always the same, seems

to return at regular intervals. If I notice it and it succeeds in

diverting my attention, if I wait for it to occur and it occurs when

I expect it, then involuntarily I laugh. Why? Because I now have

before me a machine that works automatically. This is no longer

life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it. It

belongs to the comic.

 

This is also the reason why gestures, at which we never dreamt of

laughing, become laughable when imitated by another individual. The

most elaborate explanations have been offered for this extremely

simple fact. A little reflection, however, will show that our mental

state is ever changing, and that if our gestures faithfully followed

these inner movements, if they were as fully alive as we, they would

never repeat themselves, and so would keep imitation at bay. We

begin, then, to become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves.

I mean our gestures can only be imitated in their mechanical

uniformity, and therefore exactly in what is alien to our living

personality. To imitate any one is to bring out the element of

automatism he has allowed to creep into his person. And as this is

the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no wonder that imitation

gives rise to laughter.

 

Still, if the imitation of gestures is intrinsically laughable, it

will become even more so when it busies itself in deflecting them,

though without altering their form, towards some mechanical

occupation, such as sawing wood, striking on an anvil, or tugging

away at an imaginary bell-rope. Not that vulgarity is the essence of

the comic,—although certainly it is to some extent an ingredient,—

but rather that the incriminated gesture seems more frankly

mechanical when it can be connected with a simple operation, as

though it were intentionally mechanical. To suggest this mechanical

interpretation ought to be one of the favourite devices of parody.

We have reached this result through deduction, but I imagine clowns

have long had an intuition of the fact.

 

This seems to me the solution of the little riddle propounded by

Pascal in one passage of his Thoughts: “Two faces that are alike,

although neither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh

when together, on account of their likeness.” It might just as well

be said: “The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is

laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition.” The truth

is that a really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever

there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some

mechanism at work behind the living. Analyse the impression you get

from two faces that are too much alike, and you will find that you

are thinking of two copies cast in the same mould, or two

impressions of the same seal, or two reproductions of the same

negative,—in a word, of some manufacturing process or other. This

deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of

laughter.

 

And laughter will be more pronounced still, if we find on the stage

not merely two characters, as in the example from Pascal, but

several, nay, as great a number as possible, the image of one

another, who come and go, dance and gesticulate together,

simultaneously striking the same attitudes and tossing their arms

about in the same manner. This time, we distinctly think of

marionettes. Invisible threads seem to us to be joining arms to

arms, legs to legs, each muscle in one face to its fellow-muscle in

the other: by reason of the absolute uniformity which prevails, the

very litheness of the bodies seems to stiffen as we gaze, and the

actors themselves seem transformed into automata. Such, at least,

appears to be the artifice underlying this somewhat obvious form of

amusement. I daresay the performers have never read Pascal, but what

they do is merely to realise to the full the suggestions contained

in Pascal’s words. If, as is undoubtedly the case, laughter is

caused in the second instance by the hallucination of a mechanical

effect, it must already have been so, though in more subtle fashion,

in the first.

 

Continuing along this path, we dimly perceive the increasingly

important and far-reaching consequences of the law we have just

stated. We faintly catch still more fugitive glimpses of mechanical

effects, glimpses suggested by man’s complex actions, no longer

merely by his gestures. We instinctively feel that the usual devices

of comedy, the periodical repetition of a word or a scene, the

systematic inversion of the parts, the geometrical development of a

farcical misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances, must

derive their comic force from the same source,—the art of the

playwright probably consisting in setting before us an obvious

clockwork arrangement of human events, while carefully preserving an

outward aspect of probability and thereby retaining something of the

suppleness of life. But we must not forestall results which will be

duly disclosed in the course of our analysis.

V

Before going further, let us halt a moment and glance around. As we

hinted at the outset of this study, it would be idle to attempt to

derive every comic effect from one simple