Amazing essay on Henri Bergson and his philosophical ideas about laughter
Laughter, wrote Bergson, had 'a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation'.
E.B. White and Katherine S White: "Humour can be dissected, as a frgog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind"
Bergson: the comic does not exist outside of the strictly human. [...] It is possible to laugh at animals or vegetables but only on the condition that we are able to detect the human in them.
Bergson: laughter has no greater foe than emotion. When the emotional stakes are too high they don't allow for the momentary anaestesia of the heart that laughter demands.
Bergson: laughter appears to stand in need of an echo. Social bonding. Laughter plays an important part in our various social groups.
Bergson describes life as an ever-changing, creative (ie, producing entirely new and inpredictable forms) and spontaneous movement. In this sense, life exhibits the opposite of the mechanical tendencies of inert matter characterised by rigidity, predictability and repetitiveness. [...]. Society therefore needs its members to display 'the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability', and needs to guard itself against 'a certain rigidity of body, mind and character'.
A man walking down the street, he slips and falls. Hilarity ensues. According to Bergson, it is the involuntary nature of the action that makes us laugh. Stumbles, gaffes, slipups, bloopers and general clumsiness indicate both a lack of versatility and of awareness; "where one would expect to find the wideawake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being", we find instead "a certain mechanical inelasticity".
Consider a scene from the classic film Modern Times (1936) in which Charlie Chaplin plays a factory worker subjected to the relentless cadence of an assembly line. Even outside the factory, he continues to erratically tighten imaginary bolts, stuck in the repetitive movement he has been executing all day. In Bergsonian terms, this is funny because we are seeing someone act out deeply engrained habits even though the circumstances demand otherwise. Both in the case of accidental blunders and in carefully choreographed slapstick comedy, we are laughing at figures who lack ‘elasticity’, who are mechanically following a predetermined trajectory and therefore fail to adapt to their surroundings.
