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ronan_lynch 's review for:
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
by Henri Bergson
2.5 stars
The book both in introduction and in the closing parts mention how laughter is serving a societal function – by laughing people are trying to humiliate those who are different from them and therefore force them to change those differences into similarities of the group. However, the author never really explores this deeply enough, at the very end mentioning that the reflection of society that an in-depth analysis would provide would be too depressing.
For a book that concerns itself with humour, it had very little humour. In fact, the text contains vocabulary that is smarter than it has to be to get the meaning across. At times, it seems that the author does not know what he is attempting to write – a guide for those who wish to understand terms connected to comedy or a collection of short literary analysis of French literature long past its due date or a literary novel rich in metaphors inserted in-between philosophical logics arguments.
However, in my opinion, Laughter is really a theory book for aliens, who have lived on Earth for a few years and are still unable to understand laughter and humour and our expression of it in art – therefore it is a dictionary of common underlying themes in things that people laugh about. In Chapter 1 it explores the form (clumsiness, deformation, ugliness), Chapter 2 is devoted to movement and repetition and the many expressions these can take (at the base of it being the Jack-in-a-box concept) and Chapter 3’s only highlight was the Mark Twain interview being used as an example.
Overall, the theory of laughter is good, but for a nowadays reader it has been obscured by outdated examples and expensive terminology. The book needs a good shaking of all the dust and mold, so that only the functional – theory paragraphs are retained. (Although I did read the 1911 translation, so the fault may lay in me.)
The book both in introduction and in the closing parts mention how laughter is serving a societal function – by laughing people are trying to humiliate those who are different from them and therefore force them to change those differences into similarities of the group. However, the author never really explores this deeply enough, at the very end mentioning that the reflection of society that an in-depth analysis would provide would be too depressing.
For a book that concerns itself with humour, it had very little humour. In fact, the text contains vocabulary that is smarter than it has to be to get the meaning across. At times, it seems that the author does not know what he is attempting to write – a guide for those who wish to understand terms connected to comedy or a collection of short literary analysis of French literature long past its due date or a literary novel rich in metaphors inserted in-between philosophical logics arguments.
However, in my opinion, Laughter is really a theory book for aliens, who have lived on Earth for a few years and are still unable to understand laughter and humour and our expression of it in art – therefore it is a dictionary of common underlying themes in things that people laugh about. In Chapter 1 it explores the form (clumsiness, deformation, ugliness), Chapter 2 is devoted to movement and repetition and the many expressions these can take (at the base of it being the Jack-in-a-box concept) and Chapter 3’s only highlight was the Mark Twain interview being used as an example.
Overall, the theory of laughter is good, but for a nowadays reader it has been obscured by outdated examples and expensive terminology. The book needs a good shaking of all the dust and mold, so that only the functional – theory paragraphs are retained. (Although I did read the 1911 translation, so the fault may lay in me.)