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Reading group: Bergson’s Laughter (1900), one chapter a fortnight

Gemma Pritchard Fellow
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Play, sport & humourModern EuropeanHenri Bergson#bergson#laughter#mechanical-and-living#reading-group
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Its coordinates: 6.25 Philosophy of Sport and Play · 6.27 Philosophy of Humour

Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic is short, odd and still the most useful thing I've read as a working comic. His idea is that we laugh at ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’: the moment a person behaves like a machine, a puppet, a thing. The man who keeps walking straight after the street has turned. The speaker whose gestures repeat whatever he's saying. The official who follows a rule into absurdity.

He also says three things I keep testing on stage: that the comic is strictly human (we laugh at an animal or a hat only when it reminds us of a person), that laughter needs a momentary ‘anaesthesia of the heart’ because pity kills it, and that laughter has a social job, correcting rigidity by making people afraid of being laughed at.

Plan (three chapters, two weeks each; the old Brereton and Rothwell translation is free online and fine)

  • Chapter 1: the comic in general; the comic in forms and movements.
  • Chapter 2: the comic in situations and in words. The jack-in-the-box, the dancing puppet, the snowball.
  • Chapter 3: the comic in character, and his closing thoughts on art and laughter.

Question to carry through: is Bergson describing all comedy, or one powerful kind of it, the comedy of rigidity?

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5 replies

  1. Parisa Moghaddam

    Fellow

    Chapter 1. As a film editor I'm struck by how cinematic this is, written five years after the first screenings. Silent comedy is practically Bergson's theory filmed: bodies turned into mechanisms, repetition, the machine overtaking the man. I'd read him alongside his work on duration. Laughter is what happens when living time freezes into a habit.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    Chapter 1, on the translation. ‘Du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant’: ‘plaqué’ is like plating, a thin layer laid over. ‘Encrusted’ is a good choice, but it makes it sound heavier than the French. Bergson's mechanism is a veneer on life, not a crust.

  3. Hsieh Wei-ting

    Fellow

    Chapter 2. Game designer, so the snowball and the jack-in-the-box are my bread and butter: escalation and repeated return. What I didn't expect is that Bergson treats glitches as comic, the moment a system shows its mechanism. Players love it when a character walks into a wall forever. It's exactly a living thing turned into a machine, except here it's a machine pretending to be alive and failing.

    Helpful · 1
  4. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    Chapter 2. The rule-following official is painfully familiar from union meetings. But I'm uncomfortable with the ‘social correction’ idea. Laughter disciplines the rigid, he says. It also disciplines the different: the stammerer, the foreigner, the person who doesn't know the codes. Bergson seems untroubled by whom laughter corrects.

    Helpful · 2
  5. Gemma Pritchard

    Fellow

    Chapter 3, and my answer. Bergson explains a big family of comedy: character comedy, slapstick, bureaucracy, catchphrases. He does not explain wordplay well, or the surreal, or the warm laugh of recognition. And Hugo's worry is real: his laughter is a policeman. The best comedy I know turns that around and laughs at the rigid system, not at the person who can't fit it. Bergson would call that the same mechanism. I'd call it a different moral choice about where to point it.

    Helpful · 3