Books: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
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Henri Bergson >> Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
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LAUGHTER
AN ESSAY ON THE MEANING OF THE COMIC
BY HENRI BERGSON
MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE
AUTHORISED TRANSLATION
BY CLOUDESLEY BRERETON L. ES L. (PARIS), M.A. (CANTAB)
AND FRED ROTHWELL B.A. (LONDON)
TRANSLATORS' PREFACE
This work, by Professor Bergson, has been revised in detail by the
author himself, and the present translation is the only authorised
one. For this ungrudging labour of revision, for the thoroughness
with which it has been carried out, and for personal sympathy in
many a difficulty of word and phrase, we desire to offer our
grateful acknowledgment to Professor Bergson. It may be pointed out
that the essay on Laughter originally appeared in a series of three
articles in one of the leading magazines in France, the Revue de
Paris. This will account for the relatively simple form of the work
and the comparative absence of technical terms. It will also explain
why the author has confined himself to exposing and illustrating his
novel theory of the comic without entering into a detailed
discussion of other explanations already in the field. He none the
less indicates, when discussing sundry examples, why the principal
theories, to which they have given rise, appear to him inadequate.
To quote only a few, one may mention those based on contrast,
exaggeration, and degradation.
The book has been highly successful in France, where it is in its
seventh edition. It has been translated into Russian, Polish, and
Swedish. German and Hungarian translations are under preparation.
Its success is due partly to the novelty of the explanation offered
of the comic, and partly also to the fact that the author
incidentally discusses questions of still greater interest and
importance. Thus, one of the best known and most frequently quoted
passages of the book is that portion of the last chapter in which
the author outlines a general theory of art.
C. B. F. R.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE COMIC IN GENERAL--THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS AND MOVEMENTS--
EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC
CHAPTER II
THE COMIC ELEMENT IN SITUATIONS AND THE COMIC ELEMENT IN WORDS
CHAPTER III
THE COMIC IN CHARACTER
CHAPTER I
THE COMIC IN GENERAL--THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS AND MOVEMENTS--
EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC.
What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable?
What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-
andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and
a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us
invariably the same essence from which so many different products
borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The
greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this
little problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of
slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge
flung at philosophic speculation. Our excuse for attacking the
problem in our turn must lie in the fact that we shall not aim at
imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it,
above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall
treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine ourselves to
watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible gradations
from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the strangest
metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybe we may
gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that, something
more flexible than an abstract definition,--a practical, intimate
acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship. And maybe
we may also find that, unintentionally, we have made an acquaintance
that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in
its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness. It
dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are
at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group. Can
it then fail to throw light for us on the way that human imagination
works, and more particularly social, collective, and popular
imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not
also have something of its own to tell us about art and life?
At the outset we shall put forward three observations which we look
upon as fundamental. They have less bearing on the actually comic
than on the field within which it must be sought.
I
The first point to which attention should be called is that the
comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A
landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant
and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal,
but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or
expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of,
in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that
men have given it,--the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It
is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has
not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers.
Several have defined man as "an animal which laughs." They might
equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for
if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same
effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the
stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.
Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the
ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as
though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it
fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm
and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter
has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not
laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even
with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our
affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a
society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no
more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas
highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every
event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither
know nor understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to become
interested in everything that is being said and done; act, in
imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a
word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the
touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume
importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now step aside,
look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn
into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the sound of
music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers at once
to appear ridiculous. How many human actions would stand a similar
test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to
gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To
produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something
like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to
intelligence, pure and simple.
This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other
intelligences. And here is the third fact to which attention should
be drawn. You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself
isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo,
Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined
sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by
reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash,
to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain.
Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel
within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the
less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
It may, perchance, have happened to you, when seated in a railway
carriage or at table d'hote, to hear travellers relating to one
another stories which must have been comic to them, for they laughed
heartily. Had you been one of their company, you would have laughed
like them; but, as you were not, you had no desire whatever to do
so. A man who was once asked why he did not weep at a sermon, when
everybody else was shedding tears, replied: "I don't belong to the
parish!" What that man thought of tears would be still more true of
laughter. However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a
kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers,
real or imaginary. How often has it been said that the fuller the
theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience! On the
other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comic
effects are incapable of translation from one language to another,
because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social
group! It is through not understanding the importance of this double
fact that the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity in
which the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange,
isolated phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human
activity. Hence those definitions which tend to make the comic into
an abstract relation between ideas: "an intellectual contrast," "a
palpable absurdity," etc.,--definitions which, even were they really
suitable to every form of the comic, would not in the least explain
why the comic makes us laugh. How, indeed, should it come about that
this particular logical relation, as soon as it is perceived,
contracts, expands and shakes our limbs, whilst all other relations
leave the body unaffected? It is not from this point of view that we
shall approach the problem. To understand laughter, we must put it
back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all
must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social
one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our
investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life
in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification.
Let us clearly mark the point towards which our three preliminary
observations are converging. The comic will come into being, it
appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one
of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into
play nothing but their intelligence. What, now, is the particular
point on which their attention will have to be concentrated, and
what will here be the function of intelligence? To reply to these
questions will be at once to come to closer grips with the problem.
But here a few examples have become indispensable.
II
A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by
burst out laughing. They would not laugh at him, I imagine, could
they suppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on
the ground. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary.
Consequently, it is not his sudden change of attitude that raises a
laugh, but rather the involuntary element in this change,--his
clumsiness, in fact. Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He
should have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle. Instead of
that, through lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a
kind of physical obstinacy, AS A RESULT, IN FACT, OF RIGIDITY OR OF
MOMENTUM, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when
the circumstances of the case called for something else. That is the
reason of the man's fall, and also of the people's laughter.
Now, take the case of a person who attends to the petty occupations
of his everyday life with mathematical precision. The objects around
him, however, have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the
result being that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it
out all covered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a
solid chair he finds himself sprawling on the floor, in a word his
actions are all topsy-turvy or mere beating the air, while in every
case the effect is invariably one of momentum. Habit has given the
impulse: what was wanted was to check the movement or deflect it. He
did nothing of the sort, but continued like a machine in the same
straight line. The victim, then, of a practical joke is in a
position similar to that of a runner who falls,--he is comic for the
same reason. The laughable element in both cases consists of a
certain MECHANICAL INELASTICITY, just where one would expect to find
the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human
being. The only difference in the two cases is that the former
happened of itself, whilst the latter was obtained artificially. In
the first instance, the passer-by does nothing but look on, but in
the second the mischievous wag intervenes.
All the same, in both cases the result has been brought about by an
external circumstance. The comic is therefore accidental: it
remains, so to speak, in superficial contact with the person. How is
it to penetrate within? The necessary conditions will be fulfilled
when mechanical rigidity no longer requires for its manifestation a
stumbling-block which either the hazard of circumstance or human
knavery has set in its way, but extracts by natural processes, from
its own store, an inexhaustible series of opportunities for
externally revealing its presence. Suppose, then, we imagine a mind
always thinking of what it has just done and never of what it is
doing, like a song which lags behind its accompaniment. Let us try
to picture to ourselves a certain inborn lack of elasticity of both
senses and intelligence, which brings it to pass that we continue to
see what is no longer visible, to hear what is no longer audible, to
say what is no longer to the point: in short, to adapt ourselves to
a past and therefore imaginary situation, when we ought to be
shaping our conduct in accordance with the reality which is present.
This time the comic will take up its abode in the person himself; it
is the person who will supply it with everything--matter and form,
cause and opportunity. Is it then surprising that the absent-minded
individual--for this is the character we have just been describing--
has usually fired the imagination of comic authors? When La Bruyere
came across this particular type, he realised, on analysing it, that
he had got hold of a recipe for the wholesale manufacture of comic
effects. As a matter of fact he overdid it, and gave us far too
lengthy and detailed a description of Menalque, coming back to his
subject, dwelling and expatiating on it beyond all bounds. The very
facility of the subject fascinated him. Absentmindedness, indeed, is
not perhaps the actual fountain-head of the comic, but surely it is
contiguous to a certain stream of facts and fancies which flows
straight from the fountain-head. It is situated, so to say, on one
of the great natural watersheds of laughter.
Now, the effect of absentmindedness may gather strength in its turn.
There is a general law, the first example of which we have just
encountered, and which we will formulate in the following terms:
when a certain comic effect has its origin in a certain cause, the
more natural we regard the cause to be, the more comic shall we find
the effect. Even now we laugh at absentmindedness when presented to
us as a simple fact. Still more laughable will be the
absentmindedness we have seen springing up and growing before our
very eyes, with whose origin we are acquainted and whose life-
history we can reconstruct. To choose a definite example: suppose a
man has taken to reading nothing but romances of love and chivalry.
Attracted and fascinated by his heroes, his thoughts and intentions
gradually turn more and more towards them, till one fine day we find
him walking among us like a somnambulist. His actions are
distractions. But then his distractions can be traced back to a
definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of ABSENCE of
mind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the PRESENCE
of the individual in quite definite, though imaginary, surroundings.
Doubtless a fall is always a fall, but it is one thing to tumble
into a well because you were looking anywhere but in front of you,
it is quite another thing to fall into it because you were intent
upon a star. It was certainly a star at which Don Quixote was
gazing. How profound is the comic element in the over-romantic,
Utopian bent of mind! And yet, if you reintroduce the idea of
absentmindedness, which acts as a go-between, you will see this
profound comic element uniting with the most superficial type. Yes,
indeed, these whimsical wild enthusiasts, these madmen who are yet
so strangely reasonable, excite us to laughter by playing on the
same chords within ourselves, by setting in motion the same inner
mechanism, as does the victim of a practical joke or the passer-by
who slips down in the street. They, too, are runners who fall and
simple souls who are being hoaxed--runners after the ideal who
stumble over realities, child-like dreamers for whom life delights
to lie in wait. But, above all, they are past-masters in
absentmindedness, with this superiority over their fellows that
their absentmindedness is systematic and organised around one
central idea, and that their mishaps are also quite coherent, thanks
to the inexorable logic which reality applies to the correction of
dreams, so that they kindle in those around them, by a series of
cumulative effects, a hilarity capable of unlimited expansion.
Now, let us go a little further. Might not certain vices have the
same relation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea has to
intellect? Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to the
will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature of the soul.
Doubtless there are vices into which the soul plunges deeply with
all its pregnant potency, which it rejuvenates and drags along with
it into a moving circle of reincarnations. Those are tragic vices.
But the vice capable of making us comic is, on the contrary, that
which is brought from without, like a ready-made frame into which we
are to step. It lends us its own rigidity instead of borrowing from
us our flexibility. We do not render it more complicated; on the
contrary, it simplifies us. Here, as we shall see later on in the
concluding section of this study, lies the essential difference
between comedy and drama. A drama, even when portraying passions or
vices that bear a name, so completely incorporates them in the
person that their names are forgotten, their general characteristics
effaced, and we no longer think of them at all, but rather of the
person in whom they are assimilated; hence, the title of a drama can
seldom be anything else than a proper noun. On the other hand, many
comedies have a common noun as their title: l'Avare, le Joueur, etc.
Were you asked to think of a play capable of being called le Jaloux,
for instance, you would find that Sganarelle or George Dandin would
occur to your mind, but not Othello: le Jaloux could only be the
title of a comedy. The reason is that, however intimately vice, when
comic, is associated with persons, it none the less retains its
simple, independent existence, it remains the central character,
present though invisible, to which the characters in flesh and blood
on the stage are attached. At times it delights in dragging them
down with its own weight and making them share in its tumbles. More
frequently, however, it plays on them as on an instrument or pulls
the strings as though they were puppets. Look closely: you will find
that the art of the comic poet consists in making us so well
acquainted with the particular vice, in introducing us, the
spectators, to such a degree of intimacy with it, that in the end we
get hold of some of the strings of the marionette with which he is
playing, and actually work them ourselves; this it is that explains
part of the pleasure we feel. Here, too, it is really a kind of
automatism that makes us laugh--an automatism, as we have already
remarked, closely akin to mere absentmindedness. To realise this
more fully, it need only be noted that a comic character is
generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comic
person is unconscious. As though wearing the ring of Gyges with
reverse effect, he becomes invisible to himself while remaining
visible to all the world. A character in a tragedy will make no
change in his conduct because he will know how it is judged by us;
he may continue therein, even though fully conscious of what he is
and feeling keenly the horror he inspires in us. But a defect that
is ridiculous, as soon as it feels itself to be so, endeavours to
modify itself, or at least to appear as though it did. Were Harpagon
to see us laugh at his miserliness, I do not say that he would get
rid of it, but he would either show it less or show it differently.
Indeed, it is in this sense only that laughter "corrects men's
manners." It makes us at once endeavour to appear what we ought to
be, what some day we shall perhaps end in being.
It is unnecessary to carry this analysis any further. From the
runner who falls to the simpleton who is hoaxed, from a state of
being hoaxed to one of absentmindedness, from absentmindedness to
wild enthusiasm, from wild enthusiasm to various distortions of
character and will, we have followed the line of progress along
which the comic becomes more and more deeply imbedded in the person,
yet without ceasing, in its subtler manifestations, to recall to us
some trace of what we noticed in its grosser forms, an effect of
automatism and of inelasticity. Now we can obtain a first glimpse--a
distant one, it is true, and still hazy and confused--of the
laughable side of human nature and of the ordinary function of
laughter.
What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert
attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation,
together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to
adapt ourselves in consequence. TENSION and ELASTICITY are two
forces, mutually complementary, which life brings into play. If
these two forces are lacking in the body to any considerable extent,
we have sickness and infirmity and accidents of every kind. If they
are lacking in the mind, we find every degree of mental deficiency,
every variety of insanity. Finally, if they are lacking in the
character, we have cases of the gravest inadaptability to social
life, which are the sources of misery and at times the causes of
crime. Once these elements of inferiority that affect the serious
side of existence are removed--and they tend to eliminate themselves
in what has been called the struggle for life--the person can live,
and that in common with other persons. But society asks for
something more; it is not satisfied with simply living, it insists
on living well. What it now has to dread is that each one of us,
content with paying attention to what affects the essentials of
life, will, so far as the rest is concerned, give way to the easy
automatism of acquired habits. Another thing it must fear is that
the members of whom it is made up, instead of aiming after an
increasingly delicate adjustment of wills which will fit more and
more perfectly into one another, will confine themselves to
respecting simply the fundamental conditions of this adjustment: a
cut-and-dried agreement among the persons will not satisfy it, it
insists on a constant striving after reciprocal adaptation. Society
will therefore be suspicious of all INELASTICITY of character, of
mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a
slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist
tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round
which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an
eccentricity. And yet, society cannot intervene at this stage by
material repression, since it is not affected in a material fashion.
It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy, but only as a
symptom--scarcely a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture,
therefore, will be its reply. Laughter must be something of this
kind, a sort of SOCIAL GESTURE. By the fear which it inspires, it
restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact
certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into
their shell and go to sleep, and, in short, softens down whatever
the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical
inelasticity. Laughter, then, does not belong to the province of
esthetics alone, since unconsciously (and even immorally in many
particular instances) it pursues a utilitarian aim of general
improvement. And yet there is something esthetic about it, since the
comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed
from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as
works of art. In a word, if a circle be drawn round those actions
and dispositions--implied in individual or social life--to which
their natural consequences bring their own penalties, there remains
outside this sphere of emotion and struggle--and within a neutral
zone in which man simply exposes himself to man's curiosity--a
certain rigidity of body, mind and character, that society would
still like to get rid of in order to obtain from its members the
greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability. This
rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.
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