dreamtokens 's review for:

Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Henri Bergson

4.0

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Bergson 19s Theory of laughter surprised me in a way I wasn 19t expecting. What I mean is that it was not his theory of laughter that caught me off guard, but rather his understanding of life and art. To him, art is made for the individual, and here is the difference: the comic is, he says, always general. It 19s supposed to correct what is anti-social, not necessary immoral, and that is why it stands between art and life, being a little bit of both. Bergson discusses what causes the comic: to him, it 19s always a fracture in the norm, a contradiction between nature and mechanism. The comic happens when we make life look mechanical, when it repeats itself, when we assimilate it with a lifeless object, when it breaks its usual course, or when our attention is suddenly moved from the spiritual to the physical (take this saying 1CHe was a virtuous and fat man 1D). Such rules can be applied to more types of comic, both situational and linguistic. Having stated that, Bergson goes on to define the character that is the utmost comic (that being, a vice, because in comedy, a person is always a stereotype for a certain kind of fault): it 19s vanity. To him, there is no fault more superficial and profound at the same type, and that vanity brings all the vices together, making them work for it. That being said, laugher is a weapon of society that is not always good and doesn 19t always bring good: it requires a sort of distance from its object, a sort of malice. It has no bigger enemy than emotion. Its function, according to Bergson, is to intimidate, humiliating. Laugher is always a social action, it is addressed to intelligence, but always together with other intelligences. There is no comic outside of what is truly human.