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WorkHenri Bergson

Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

The one book Bergson wrote about comedy: why a person becomes funny at the exact moment they stop adapting and start running like a machine.

by Henri Bergson150 passages held

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Original title
Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique
First published
(aged 41)
Original language
French

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Overview

Three articles ran in the Revue de Paris on 1 and 15 February and 1 March 1900; Félix Alcan gathered them into a book before the year was out. The material was older than the magazine. Bergson had first tried it out in a lecture in Auvergne years earlier, and the essay keeps a teacher's manner, taking its examples off the street and the stage in front of it — a man who trips over a stone, a puppet whose strings somebody else is holding, a scene out of Molière that keeps coming round. The claim underneath runs to one line: we laugh at the mechanical laid over the living. A person becomes comic at the point where adapting stops and running on begins, where what should be supple has gone rigid. Two consequences follow, and they lift the essay above a theory of jokes. Laughter is human and nothing else — a hat or an animal is funny only for the human attitude it has borrowed. And laughter is unkind by design: it requires a momentary anaesthesia of the heart, and it corrects by humiliation what a society cannot correct by argument. Theorists of comedy have never let the book go and have never accepted it either; the standing objection is that rigidity cannot account for wit, which is where most jokes come from. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell put it into English in 1911, and that version has gone through edition after edition since. Bergson himself added to the frame rather than the argument: a preface written twenty-four years later defends his method — work out how the comic is manufactured, instead of cataloguing what its effects feel like — as the more scientific of the two approaches.

Key concepts

What does the mechanical laid over the living actually mean?

It is a test rather than a metaphor. Look for the point where a person stops adjusting to the situation in front of them and something rigid runs on by itself: a repeated gesture, a fixed idea, a body gone automatic. Wherever that stiffness shows through a living being, Bergson predicts laughter; where the response stays supple, he predicts none.

What is the anaesthesia of the heart?

The brief numbing of sympathy that every laugh requires. Bergson's observation is that feeling and comedy cannot occupy the same moment: let a comic figure move you and he stops being funny at once. Laughter therefore addresses the intelligence rather than the emotions, and needs onlookers detached enough to notice a rigidity instead of suffering alongside it.

What is the interference of two series?

A situation that belongs to two independent chains of events at once and can be read correctly in both: the misunderstanding, the double meaning, the letter opened by the wrong person. It is one of the manufacturing procedures the essay catalogues, beside repetition and inversion, and it works the same way in farce, in stage comedy and in wordplay.

Why does absent-mindedness matter so much to this theory?

It is the model case. A distracted man walks into his situation instead of meeting it, which is exactly the inattention to life the theory names. Comic characters are built by extending that trait until it hardens: each is absorbed in one idea and blind to the circumstances around him, and the absorption is what the audience laughs at.

Why does comedy give us types where tragedy gives us individuals?

Because the comic is a rigidity, and a rigidity can be shared. Tragedy fixes on what is unrepeatable in one person, so it takes a name for its title. Comedy fixes on a trait many people wear, so it takes the trait for its title instead. That difference is also why comedy is aimed outward, at a society.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The mechanical laid over the living

What exactly is it in a person that makes onlookers laugh? The answer offered here names one thing: the moment adapting stops and something rigid starts running on by itself.

A man trips over a stone and we laugh, not at the fall but at the stiffness that failed to adjust to it. Bergson generalises: the comic appears wherever a living being behaves like a machine, in a gesture repeated, a character who cannot bend, a body gone automatic. It follows that only the human is comic. A hat or an animal amuses us through the human attitude it has borrowed, never on its own account.

  • mechanism
  • automatism
  • rigidity
  • habit
  • comic character
  • character
  • comic theory
  • nature

Enter a dialogue

Laughter as a social punishment

Why is laughter unkind? Bergson takes the cruelty to be its function rather than a flaw, a group humiliating what it cannot argue a member out of.

Sympathy has to be switched off before a joke can land: laughter demands a momentary anaesthesia of the heart, and a comic figure who moves us stops being comic. Bergson reads that hardness as social work. A group cannot reason a member out of rigidity, so it shames him, and the laugh is the gesture of correction. Comedy therefore belongs with the manners of a society, and its targets shift as those manners do.

  • social correction
  • society
  • sympathy
  • emotion
  • laughter
  • comedy
  • tragedy

Enter a dialogue

How a comic effect is manufactured

Rather than ask what laughter feels like, the essay asks how the thing that causes it is built, and claims that is the more scientific of the two questions.

Method is the quiet argument, defended again in a preface written twenty-four years later: catalogue the procedures, not the sensations. Bergson works through the devices one at a time, repetition, inversion, the interference of two independent series, the transposition of a phrase into the wrong key, and shows the same few running through farce, stage comedy and wordplay alike. Critics have pressed the gap ever since, because wit, where most jokes live, resists reduction to rigidity.

  • comic
  • comic situations
  • repetition
  • transposition
  • wit
  • language
  • dramatic structure
  • theater
  • art
  • aesthetics
  • imagination
  • absurdity

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
150
distinct concepts
261
by passages held, corpus-wide
#413

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “comic theory” and “language”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
comic theorylanguage13
charactercomedy10
automatismcomedy9
comedylaughter9
comedymechanism9
comic theorylaughter9
aestheticscomedy8
comic theorymechanism7
aestheticscomic theory4
aestheticslaughter4
automatismcharacter4
automatismcomic theory4
laughtermechanism4
automatismlaughter3
automatismmechanism3
aestheticscharacter2
aestheticslanguage2
automatismlanguage2
comedylanguage2
languagelaughter2
languagemechanism2
aestheticsautomatism1
aestheticsmechanism1
characterlanguage1
characterlaughter1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1889 Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience)

    Duration makes its first appearance here, in a doctoral thesis. Memory, comedy, dreaming and evolution are all later applications of what this book works out.

     EN
  2. 1900 Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique) you are here EN
  3. 1901 Dreams (Le Rêve)

    In French it survives as a chapter of L'Énergie spirituelle, the 1919 collection of his occasional pieces; in English it has gone on being sold as a book of its own, which is why a single lecture stands here beside three much larger works.

     EN
  4. 1907 Creative Evolution (L'Évolution créatrice)

    Fame arrived with this one: audiences at the Collège de France who had not come to study, reissue after reissue, a readership well outside philosophy.

     EN
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