Laughter

by Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson is the author of numerous works including Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution and Time and Free Will. His work has been influential for many thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze.
Drew Burk is a graduate and technical director at the European Graduate School. He is the translator of such philosophers as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and Paul Virilio. ----What does laughter mean? What is the fundamental element of the laughable? What common ground can be found between the grimace of a clown, a play on words, a similar situation in a burlesque and a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will invariably yield us the same essence from which so many different products borrow either their obtrusive odor or their delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle on down, have tackled this tiny problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away, escaping only to pop up again, as a lively challenge to philosophical speculation.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology, Humor, France, Essays, Comedy

132 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1900

About the author

Popular and accessible works of French philosopher and writer Henri Louis Bergson include Creative Evolution (1907) and The Creative Mind (1934) and largely concern the importance of intuition as a means of attaining knowledge and the élan vital present in all living things; he won the Nobel Prize of 1927 for literature.

Although international fame and influence of this late 19th century-early 20th century man reached heights like cult during his lifetime, after the Second World War, his influence decreased notably. Whereas such thinkers as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Paul Sartre, and Lévinas explicitly acknowledged his influence on their thought, Bergsonism of Gilles Deleuze in 1966 marked the reawakening of interest. Deleuze recognized his concept of multiplicity as his most enduring contribution to thinking. This concept attempts to unify heterogeneity and continuity, contradictory features, in a consistent way. This revolutionary multiplicity despite its difficulty opens the way to a re-conception of community, or so many today think.

Reviews

[Luís · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's be clear: this is a reference book.
A decryptor of the comic. The comic decryptor.
This text, recently discovered in the last century, often haunts me when I attend a sketch or a current situation that awakens my zygomaticus. Instead, I find the different types of laughter explored by Henri Bergson.
This work is not a novel but an essay. As for the subject, it is pretty severe but also fascinating to read.
So, do we need the forgiving laugh to read it? Yes. Could you read it?

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really interesting read. I was expecting this to say something like, “Comedy is due to the unexpected – something we don’t expect happens and so we laugh”. That is, I was expecting to be bored out of my mind. Then a lot of his examples were from plays I’ve never read – so it would be like someone talking about comedy with sole reference to Friends or Seinfeld – two shows I’ve never seen an entire episode of – this made following some of his points much harder than it ought to have been. This was anything but boring, though. He starts by saying that humour is essentially social. He makes an awful lot of this little idea. I’m not going to trace his argument – as this is a very short essay, and one I really can recommend. It is also available from Project Gutenberg.

So, you are sitting at a café and someone comes running down the street and trips, stumbles and falls. You laugh. Why? There is no point denying that you would laugh – Australia’s Funniest Home Videos has been going for age based primarily around people falling over. Bergson’s idea is that we laugh because the person falling over has stopped being a person. If by person we mean someone that is able to freely choose what they can do, clearly someone tripping over isn’t really acting as a person at that moment. He says they are in fact acting in a mechanical way. If they had been acting as a ‘human’ they would have side-stepped the thing that tripped them up and gone on their way. Being human is fluid and implies change and adjustment to meet the needs of the moment. Tripping, then, is symbolic of all things that are less than human. It is the runner going on mechanically, despite it causing them to fall, that we find funny. He sees the equation, person as machine equals funny as a motif that is repeatedly available in our humour. And not just in slapstick humour, but also in verbal and situational humour too. We find stereotypes funny because they can be relied upon to act in a way that will be mindlessly followed or carried on according to a kind of rule – and acting according to a rule is essentially acting mechanically.

There is a really interesting point at which he says that humour must appeal to reason, and not the emotions. He makes this point by saying that a hunch-back can be funny – and this because we ‘non-hunchbacks’ can imitate a hunch-back’s stoop and walk, and again, notice there is a kind of stiff, mechanical, ‘human as machine’ feel to how a hunchback walks. But, a cancer patient can’t really be made to be nearly as funny. The things that cancel humour seem to be when we struggle to alienate the object of our humour from an emotional response and when the affliction under consideration isn’t really one we can impersonate.

Now, this brings us to the difference between comedy and tragedy. And this was the crowning moment of the essay for me. Comedy tends to deal with the general. It is possible, and in fact likely, that a comedy will be named after a general noun – The Sleepwalker or The Bridegroom, where as a tragedy will be named after a proper noun – Hamlet, Othello... Comedy is about types, recognisable and easily identifiable types who act out their behaviours according to their type. Again, these types are mechanical and it is their machine like behaviours that we find ‘non-human’ and therefore funny. Ironically, even though it is only the human we find funny, it is this particularly non-human aspect of the human that amuses us. Animals are only funny in so far as they remind us of humans. But humans are funny when they are least human.

With tragedy we are always dealing with a very particular person. It is their individuality that makes them tragic. Even when the title of the play is quite general, The Death of a Salesman, say – the play can only really work as a tragedy in so far as the salesman, the main focus of the play, is not left as a caricature, but is given real depth of characterisation. Think of Hamlet and three hundred years of psychological arguments about his endlessly complex character. Now think of Falstaff.

Bergson’s point is that the comic character is always less than human. But this isn’t really about us laughing and pointing at the freaks – our laughter serves a moral purpose for Bergson. Because we laugh at a mechanistic vision of humans, humans devoid of particularity, it is laughter that reverses the increasing pull on us towards humanity as ‘machine’. Humour undermines all of our ‘automatic’ responses – our vanities as much as our unthinking and always just out of sight and unacknowledged selves – and forces a mirror up to us, so we can be ‘human’. It forces us to be ‘plastic’, as he calls it, not stiff and mechanical.

There were parts of this when I thought he was going to say that humour is awful because it is always us laughing at other people and that that is wrong – but while humour does involve us always laughing at other people, it is the ‘non-human’ in these other people that we find amusing and so humour is actually an affirmation of what is the truly human.

I can’t begin to tell you how interesting I find that idea.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the main reasons I’m glad I speak German is that I can understand Gerhard Polt. His humor does not translate [go to 15:26] well in other languages; his observations on German conservatism can be misinterpreted. Even his Bavarian dialect doesn’t connect in some parts of the German-speaking world. One my greatest regrets is that I don’t speak any other languages because I know I’m missing so many great laughs. I remember a few years back when my favorite television comedy, Fawlty Towers, was going to premiere in Germany—dubbed, of course—and being horrified by how poorly it translated. My friend looked at me and shook his head as he shamed me, “What’s so funny about this?” It took me some time to elevate my standing in his eyes. My obsessive love for comedy led to me this philosophical nugget.

The English translation of Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic was published in 1911. Despite its age, many of his observations about humor still hold up. A fundamental concept to understand why people laugh is rigidity, or as I would call it: expectation. He uses the example of finding humor when we see someone walking who trips, staggers awkwardly and perhaps falls (if they don’t get hurt, although some might find humor in that). When we expect a certain outcome, we can find humor in the unexpected. This is the essence of great slapstick in many silent movies. The opposite is also true. We see humor in events when our expectations do not happen. This type of comedy is universal.

Laughter does not exist in a vacuum; to create and appreciate comedy, to link it to both the intellect and emotion, is uniquely human. When we see humor in animals, it is because we infer some human trait or activity in them. We must be able to compare or identify it with something we already understand, a frame of reference, be it experience, context, language or culture, is required. For example, when Bergson writes “[a]bsentmindedness is always comical,” it conjures images of Lord Emsworth from P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle stories. We all have met someone like him. Moreover, cultural context and a frame of reference are needed to produce laughter. Or, as Bergson writes, “Comedy depicts characters we have already come across and shall meet again.” Laughter bonds. Its “business [is] to repress any separatist tendency.” To take this argument to its extreme, laughter creates community; the more we laugh together, the more we find common feelings among ourselves.

These insights impress even more today because Bergson would not have known about Charlie Chaplin; what few Lumière-inspired films he may have seen were mostly technological novelties. He knew nothing about P.G. Wodehouse or stand-up comics or cartoons. He certainly couldn’t have envisioned feature films with color and sound or television sitcoms. His views of “the comic” were based on personal experience and observations, reading, and from viewing plays, indeed many of his examples of humor are based on old French plays, especially by Molière:

“You are only bound to treat people according to form,” says Dr. Diaforius in the Malade imaginaire. Again, says Dr. Bahis, in L’Amour medicine: “It is better to die through following the rules than to recover through violating them.”

Bergson’s humor seems to consist of a chuckle or a wry smile. I wonder if he ever experienced a gasping-for-air, snot-bubble-producing, tear-inducing kind of laugh. What would he have thought about a classic Marx Brothers scene or Groucho's quick quips? Or a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon? Would he have reveled in a classic routine by Bob and Ray? Would he have have been offended by the stereotyped Inspector Clouseau? I’m guessing he might have had some difficulties with Mel Brooks movies, but he might have loved some scenes from The History of the World, Part One.

But one part of comedy for which he would likely have been unprepared is how important it has become help cope with social and political issues. In the U.S., George Carlin arguably gave birth to the genre with bits like Seven Dirty Words, which led to the Supreme Court, and the Ten Commandments. This has led to comedians like Jon Stewart, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee becoming the most honest journalists and social commentators in the U.S. today. Similar trends are taking place all over the world, two of my favorites being the characters Erwin Pelzig and Jonathan Pie. I would have loved to read Bergson’s thoughts on this.

[João Barradas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A cabal pena a pagar pelo estatuto de "senhores de intelecto" será o cumprimento quase cego de um conjunto de normas, impostas pela sociedade. Condenados ao lado racional, durante as rotinas do quotidiano, entregamo-nos ao desvario quando auscultamos uma piada ou presenciamos uma cena ridícula. Nasce, pois, o riso - dito acto social, é olhado de soslaio e facilmente criticável.

Quase mimetizando um espetáculo da corte, com o foco sob o bobo bambuleante, Bergson apresenta um ensaio sobre a figura do cómico. Num tríptico, de imersão crescente, são apresentadas as suas diferentes vertentes - dos movimentos à situação, das palavras ao caráter -, ilustradas por exemplos de peças de teatro (um género a ser descoberto). Longe de o lisonjear, mais o compara a um robot, pleno de automatismos rígidos, que funcionam na base de padrões e repetições, sugando qualquer individualidade.

Sem cair numa esparrela que nos aprisione numa camisa de forças nem num buraco do tempo que nos retorne à infância, torna-se necessário compreender este gesto de fuga, tão mais importante em tempos de embotamento. Saibamos, sim, em que situações o véu do real se poderá retirar e seja permitida uma preguiça de pensar. Atingidos esses momentos, que venha a pândega de riso!

"O cómico é esse lado da pessoa pelo qual ela se parece com uma coisa, esse aspeto dos acontecimentos humanos que imita, pela sua rigidez de um género muito particular, o mecanismo puro e simples, o automatismo, ou finalmente o movimento na ausência da vida. Exprime portanto uma imperfeição individual ou coletiva que exige uam correção imediata. O riso é justamente esta coreeção. o riso é um certo gesto social, que sublinha e rerpime uma certa distração especial dos homens e dos acontecimentos."

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosophers are people who pick the obvious and easy, discuss them, and end up making them difficult and incomprehensible. We all know, for instance, what "time" (7:30 am) and "space" (I found a parking space for my car!) are. But here comes the philosopher who'll say that since time isn't eternity, then there was a time when there was no time, in a place before there were places and spaces, and then somehow at the instant between nothingness and somethingness there was a pure energy as big as the smallest head of a pin, which exploded into a big bang, and matter expanded, then cooled, creating time and space, and then your mind tries to visualize these and you are forced to conclude that you really don't know anything at all about time and space.

Millions have died, and thousands are still dying, because of philosophers. One lives and grows up in a quiet place, but the philosopher invents and drums into his head concepts like nationhood (contra neighborhood which is the only reality for each individual), love of country (and I'm not referring to country music), father(or mother)land. He has neighbors, but the philosopher expands the concept into countrymen and foreigners, us and them. Everyone is born with a harmless, natural sense of wonder but the philosopher messes things up with conflicting ideas about god or his absence, true and false gods, freedom and determinism, the will of god, heathens and the chosen people, truth, justice, fate and meaninglessness. All these just confuse and make men launch wars with their pointless killings and sufferings, and all the crazy things living species do when they've been discombobulated.

And nothing escapes the philosophers. Do you know what's funny? Do you laugh? Make other people laugh? Then you'll be surprised: reading this slim volume, just an essay of 98 pages, about something everyone knows, is no laughing matter.

First, Professor Bergson says here he will not imprison the "comic spirit" (which he regards as "a living thing," whatever that means) within a definition. But then he immediately gives his three general observations about the comic--thereby defining it in a way--which observations, to my august mind, are at the very least questionable. Initially, for example, he says that the comic is "strictly human." But how did he know this? Had he ever been a dog? Who knows, maybe dogs laugh when they bark, or smile when their hang out their tongue whenever they are patted in the head? Next, he says there is the "absence of feeling" in the comic, there's "a momentary anesthesia of the heart." But in the movies we always see: the villain, after a brutal fight, in his last moments just before he is shot in the head by the hero--LAUGHING. Surely, one can't be without any emotion facing a certain death in a matter of mere seconds? Finally, as his third general observation, Professor Bergson says our laughter is always laughter of a group, whether one's companions are real or imagined. This is wrong, too. I often laugh thinking of nothing but myself. I don't need other people (real or imagined) to be gay.

He also contradicts himself later, when discussing the comic element in gestures and movements. His basic postulate is this: "The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine." I disagree! This is in effect saying that before humans invented machines none of them had laughed at some gestures, attitudes or movements of the human body. In the first place, scientists have now concluded that the human body functions just like a complicated machine. So this philosopher is just here to confuse us. He even quotes dudes whom no one understands like Kant who said that "Laughter is the result of an expectation which, of a sudden, ends in nothing" (?) and Herbert Spencer who said that "Laughter is the indication of an effort which suddenly encounters a void." (??). Not to be outdone, Professor Bergson intones his own enigmatic sentence, something he might have expected generations to debate upon and, if he's lucky, maybe even start a war--

"A humorist is a moralist disguised as a scientist, something like an anatomist who practises dissection with the sole object of filling us with disgust; so that humour, in the restricted sense in which we are here regarding the word, is really a transposition from the moral to the scientific."

What, then, made me finish reading this tortured, obscure peroration? It was good, old-fashioned hope. I was hoping that maybe in the end the Professor would be kind enough to give a simple and clear summation of what he's trying to say. But I was extremely disappointed and, with raging emotions, I laughed because in his very last paragraph, where all my hopes had gathered in a quivering anticipation, he did a cop out and compared laughter to--hold your breath--the waves of the sea!

[Emma Sea · Rating 2 out of 5]

There seems to be such a cultural gap between Bergson and me that this book is inherently difficult to relate to. Some of this gap is in the passing of a hundred and thirteen years. But some might also be in nationality: there's an interesting 2006 article on cross-cultural humour by Stewart Lee here.

At the core I just don't find funny the things that Bergson is talking about as being comic. If I disagree on the prompt for laughter it makes it very diffcult to consider the truth in what he describes as causes for laughter.

Things Bergson says people find laughable:

A bed of artifically coloured flowers
A public speaker who sneezes while speaking
Someone who changes their hair colour from dark to blond
A man running along the street who stumbles and falls
Circus clowns (*shiver*)
A simpleton who is hoaxed
"a negro" (Oh, fuck, I'm just cringing even writing that)
"some hunchbacks" (but not all: "We will simply ask the reader to think of a number of deformities, and then to divide them into two groups: on the one hand, those which nature has directed towards the ridiculous; and on the other, those which absolutely diverge from it.")

At this point I'd like to give thanks to those 113 years.

I did find Bergson's ideas about the nature of the comic in theatre, and wordplay, interesting, but overall, not a book I'd recommend.

EDIT: I found Michael Billig's Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour CHapter 6 useful in gaining a better understanding of Bergson.

[Hameed Younis · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب قيّم حقاً
أن تقرأ كل المواقف والشخوص والكلمات التي تسبب الضحك، وما مدلولية الصحك وما يكتنف خلف الصحك أمرٌ في غاية الأهمية، بالرغم من أن الكتاب قد استهلكتي وبدأت (أحلل) النكتة أو (أصنف) الموقف المضحك حالما اتعرض إليه في مكان أو زمان
كنت اتصور أن يكون الكتاب فلسفة بحتة، ومن منطوق (لا يمكن أن نحلل الضحك في بعض الكلمات) وغيرها من هذه الجمل والتفسيرات، لكن ما وجدته كان قراءة مهمة جداً، وتصنيف ارتكازي عالي الثقل. أشبه بالتصنيفات التي وضعها جاسبر للتصنيفات النفسية. وهنا يحدوني أن أسأل الجودريديين سؤالاً؛ هل هناك كتب قيمة مثل هذا الكتاب تتناول فلسفة الضحك والسخرية والتهكم؟ وان كانت موجودة وتصميفية مثل هذا الكتاب؛ هل يمكنكم ترشيحها لي؟
فهمت اليوم بعد اتمام هذه المقالات لماذا كان اكبيرتو ايكو يعتقد أن اللغز الأكبر الذي تمنى دراسته هو فلسفة الكوميديا

[Gastjäle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bergson's main thesis is that laughter is a utilitarian instrument of correction: we laugh at mechanical behaviour, that is to say, rigid or intractable behaviour, since it is ingrained in us to point out deviant antics. He considers it a purely intellectual feature, given that laughter and comedy alienate us from deeper insights into human life.

Here's the logic: Human begins live so that our organs weed out all the superfluous information, giving us the necessities needed for existence. These data we then use instrumentally for our own needs and desires, and so we sieve out plenty of stuff through our own faculties. The everyday life and its customs naturally make us do this, and in the everyday we live as generalities, all the way down to our inner movements. Now, it is the artists who are able to take a deeper look at life-itself (which for Bergson does not seem to be a Kantian noumenon, but rather a more acute state of attention), and their works in turn allow us to see life more clearly. However, comic art is one exception to this: instead of funneling us towards the deepest recesses of our individual hearts, it postulates conventions and typifies things and people accordingly, thus offering frameworks with which we can attempt to correct others' deviant behaviour. The comic artist, Bergson says, is the only one who does not observe their own characteristics or possibilities (unlike the tragedian, who conjures up characters who they themselves might have been, yet are not); they perforce look outside themselves and collect gestures, expressions and attitudes from the external world. Since the movement is eccentric, it is a movement away from emotional aspects, and thus allows us to laugh at things without compunction. Laughter is thus purely intellectual. (However, Bergson does point out that the mechanism of laughter is unknown to us.)

Bergson's bottom-up studies lead him to conclude that the rigid, mechanical nature of risibility is threefold: we laugh at repetition, inversion and interconnection. These can be applied to many areas: Repetition can include repetitive slapstick and the re-utterance of something in a different register; inversion can include the realisation that someone has not got free will or that the meaning of a sentence is upturned; and interconnection can include a Shakespearean or Wodehousean plot or homonymy/polysemy. (These categories are not exhaustive, and I have taken some liberties in mashing them all together.) Overall, the risible is something that is against the natural flexibility of us humans. It is brought by the object's inattention, automatical behaviour or plain lackadaisical attitude. It also tends to be something that has little to do with volition—human beings are at their funniest when they resemble senseless objects in some way or another.

Bergson applied his ideas mostly with French stage comedy, with some Don Quixote thrown in for good measure. Now, let's see how they apply to the seventh episode of the Young Ones, "Bambi":

The opening discussion can be understood to be humorous in the Bergsonian terms to an extent: it relies heavily on the fact that Vyvyan and Mike are not really listening to Rick's story about Mary. When someone tells a story, it is expected that they are listened to, yet Vyvyan and Mike, due to their obvious dislike of Rick, just interrupt him and ask rather asinine questions, and also make crude comments about Mary. Once Neil arrives at the scene, visibly excited about something that he wants to share with the group, Rick simply tells him to answer the phone that has been ringing throughout the beginning—here Rick is displaying his usually vindictiveness: he was not paid attention to, so lets point out a mistake that Neil supposedly has made. Once again, a clear violation of the decorum, and hence funny. And of course, we shouldn't forget that during the opening, we get glimpses of Neil running towards the house, falling over a trash can, picking up a dead pigeon while he fumbles up etc. - classic, Bergsonian humour.

But there is something else to this scene that is funny as well that Bergson cannot account for. It is the fact that it is transgressive. We do not laugh at Vyvyan remembering Mary because she's got "enormous tits" simply because it is behaviour that needs to be corrected. We laugh at Vyvyan's crass honesty, how he says things that others wouldn't dare to say. This kind of attitude is part and parcel of his character: throughout the episode, he commits various misdemeanours, such as stealing, pulling the communication cord, leaning out of the train window, kicking Ben Elton in the head, annihilating posh kids with a hand grenade and generally two-fingering the whole world. It is obviously transgressive behaviour, and as such, it is very cathartic. I could instance the other characters here as well, yet I think Vyvyan will suffice for now—he is unbelievably dangerous to be around with, yet his brand of psychopathy is strangely lovable.

It is also absurd. Like a lot of things about the Young Ones. In "Bambi", Rick attempts to commit suicide by wolfing down laxative pills, one of Vyv's socks is animated and attempts to kill the gang, the gang teleports from the house to the laundrette by simply jumping in the air, Vyvyan literally loses his head and kicks it around, the University Challenge host is apparently the Disney Bambi who has also done a Disney nasty and to cap it all, the whole cast appeared to be simply "human beings the size of amoebas" to a scientist, whose sticky bun falls on the lot, and is thus fed to an elephant.

Now, some of these could be explained in Bergson's terms, but it's also obvious that they have plenty of elements that cannot be. Rick's suicide attempt almost makes one wish he succeeded. A sock coming to life is the opposite of mechanical objectification. The jump-teleporting is supernatural and it is taken for granted within the show's universe (yet it would have been funny even if everyone had reacted really wildly at it). Etc. etc. Like in most episodes of the Young Ones, some of the humour is derived from the fact that strange and unbelievable things happen yet they appear completely normal within the show's boundaries. The humour, then, is partly derived from a collision of worlds: the expectations of our world meet the conventions of the comic world. Yet the characters are not really mechanical in their nonchalance, at least in a Bergsonian way: they are actually very flexible, and very much embedded in their conventional milieu. The humour is also partly derived from the un-Bergsonian fact that the events are plain weird.

This shows that humour has taken leaps to some direction since Henri Bergson's time, and his ideas do not translate superbly well to our times. I might also add that I do not agree with some of the things Bergson broached, for instance his mildly pessimistic views on laughter, and seeing laughter merely as a utilitarian thing. No, there is a deeper force to laughter, and it is not by any stretch of the imagination purely intellectual: just look at mothers laughing at babies, or me laughing at Wodehouse's stories, loving the living daylights out of the man every single moment while I do so.

However, that does not mean they are not valid in a good deal of instances. That also does not mean that his account of laughter is not a fascinating, even a bit bleak, take on the subject. In all honesty, it's the best one I've seen yet: it is brilliantly argued and expressed, and it is easily applicable to a great variety of instances. It may not be a theory to end all theories of comedy, yet Bergson did not intend it to be such: he merely studied aspects and formed generalisations thereof—well in accordance with his views of what laughter does to humans and to the society at large. It is a fantastic point of departure for anyone interested in intellectualising their barrels of laughter.

[Eman Hafez · Rating 3 out of 5]

الكتاب يحتوي على ثلاث مقالات تتكلم عن "المضحك" من الأشكال والحركات والكلمات والطباع وتأثير الملهاة في المجتمع بصفة عامة

[Satyajeet · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is unique in a way, not many philosophers wrote about laughter or humor. The most any notable thinker wrote - like Plato, Hobbes, and Kant - was an essay or a few paragraphs within a discussion of another topic. Henri Bergson’s 'Laughter' was the first book by a notable philosopher on humor!
Also, it should be noted that the word humor was not used in its current sense of funniness until the 18th century.

Humor arises from the incongruity between our notions of ourselves as humans, and the subversion of that notion by the mechanical nature of our lives.

Read The Incongruity Theory here!
But that'd be too much to do on this!
But maybe you want to for some reason!
Or...just don't! Go and watch some telly goddammit!

[Tarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wunderbar eleganter und klar strukturierter Essay über die Grundlagen der Komik und des Lachens, die alle aus einer Variante mechanisierten bzw. automatisierten Lebens entstehen. Neben einer Analyse der komischen Effekte liefert Bergson zugleich eine Reflektion über die soziale Funktion des Lachens und Definitionen für Tragödie und Komödie. Stilistisch großartig, nur das Ende hätte gestraffter sein können.

[Luis · Rating 4 out of 5]

"La risa señala, en el exterior de la vida social, las rebeliones superficiales. Dibuja al instante la forma móvil de estas sacudidas. Es alegría"

Es un gran reto el que se propone Bergson al intentar estructurar cuáles son los mecanismos que nos hacen reír y cómo debemos considerar a la risa dentro de las actividades humanas. El autor estudia desde varias facetas y acompañado de ejemplos clásicos las situaciones que disparan nuestra comicidad, para terminar definiendo a la risa como un intermedio entre la vida y el arte. Para Bergson, la risa proviene de la rigidez de un personaje, de sus actos, de sus actitudes o de sus palabras, cuando hacen un esfuerzo por desviarse de lo normal y previsible. Y es que para el ser humano, ese comportamiento rígido, automático, torpe o distraído es un catalizador de una reacción adversa frente a nuestra rutina tan asimilada, un escape que nos provoca un alivio al saber que podemos concebir un mundo distinto, una "desviación de la vida" en palabras del filósofo.
"La mente, enamorada de sí, no busca en el mundo exterior más que un pretexto para materializar sus imaginaciones". Así es como define Bergson al mundo de nuestros sueños, muy cercano al mundo de lo risible, el cual también supone un descanso del esfuerzo de nuestra vida apresurada.

Otro aspecto que destaco de sus conclusiones es que la risa se considera un ejercicio intelectual, y que como tal debe estar separado de la emoción: si se conecta emocionalmente con el objeto de la risa, el chiste deja de tener sentido. La risa es una demostración sana de nuestra cultura, quizás a veces algo cruel, pero también es el antídoto contra la vanidad.

[نرمين الشامي · Rating 1 out of 5]

من اسوأ ماقرأت كترجمة وكأسلوب
كتاب قمه فى الملل والتطويل
وكل هذا وعنوان الكتاب هو الضحك ! فما ادراك لو عنوانه الهم او الغم او النكد لكان انتحر القراء من بعده :D
والكارثه انه باع 23 طبعة !! يالا الصاعقة
أشكر الله على انتهاء هذه التجربة العصيبة أما الكتاب فسألقيه من النافذة بكل سرور.

[Quiver · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye-opening dissection of laughter. However, the patient doesn’t die on the table, and with good reason: the innards are mechanical.

Laughter, according to Bergson, is provoked whenever we are confronted with some inelastic, grotesquely machine-like qualities lurking in our human nature. That may be the core message, but along the way Bergson offers a number of astute ideas.

Let’s see.

Bergson makes three opening observations:

1. 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.

This is akin to Camus’s observation in The Myth of Sisyphus that the absurd exists only as a clash of the human and the inhuman (universe). Bringing in the idea of the absurd is not irrelevant, as we’ll see shortly.

2. Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter.

A seemingly unexpected idea, given that laughter is usually associated with an excess of emotions. But focusing on personal experience, on that one moment that triggered a laugh, you realise it is suspended away from affect—to see what is funny, you have to see clearly.

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. … 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.

3. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. … However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.

Misery and laughter love company, actually insist thereon.

Now to the discussion and conclusions.

- Laughter is a reaction to the mechanistic, automatic, inelastic element in us. Because society will therefore be suspicious of all INELASTICITY of character, of mind and even of body. A viewpoint from which a society is seen as organic, and it’s reaction is thus: it disparages inorganic detritus. A gesture, therefore, will be its reply... Laughter must be something of this kind, a sort of SOCIAL GESTURE... Indeed, This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective. We laugh to chastise, therefore.

Take for example, the caricaturist: Beneath the skin-deep harmony of form, he divines the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter. So that big nose, those clam ears exaggerated are the inflexible elements that become comic when blown out of proportion.

Take as another example rigid social norm followed to the letter, due to habit: The assassin, after despatching his victim, must have got out the wrong side of the train, thereby infringing the Company's rules.

It occurs to me that the mechanisation can happen through metaphor too. Instead of using an “organic” verb, using an artificial one should elicit a reaction, e.g. I diced up the thought so that he could swallow it.

A curious, incisive comment: A deformity that may become comic is a deformity that a normally built person, could successfully imitate. Think about it: we can laugh so long as we don’t realise that the deformity is too sever, because if it is sever our emotions are triggered and we no longer see what is funny.

- In drama, the focus is on action, speech, mental concepts; in comedy the focus is on gestures. Napoleon, who was a psychologist when he wished to be so, had noticed that the transition from tragedy to comedy is effected simply by sitting down. In a dramatic situation you should have neither the time nor the presence of mind  to sit down. This is the best method for cutting short a tragic scene, for as soon as you are seated it all becomes comedy. During your next dispute, suggest that everyone sits down.

- While the tragic poet needs to split himself to create characters of great depth, the dramatist interested in comic features need not venture beyond skin-deep observations.

Poetic imagination is but a fuller view of reality. If the characters created by a poet give us the impression of life, it is only because they are the poet himself,—multiplication or division of the poet,—the poet plumbing the depths of his own nature in so powerful an effort of inner observation that he lays hold of the potential in the real, and takes up what nature has left as a mere outline or sketch in his soul in order to make of it a finished work of art.

Altogether different is the kind of observation from which comedy springs. It is directed outwards. … Settling on the surface, it will not be more than skin-deep, dealing with persons at the point at which they come into contact and become capable of resembling one another.

- Whilst the prevailing idea (at the time) was that akin to Theophile Gautier’s—that the comic in its extreme form was the logic of the absurd—Bergson offers an alternative logic: that of dreams.

Laughter, as we have seen, is incompatible with emotion. If there exists a madness that is laughable, it can only be one compatible with the general health of the mind,—a sane type of madness, one might say. Now, there is a sane state of the mind that resembles madness in every respect, in which we find the same associations of ideas as we do in lunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed idea. This state is that of dreams. So either our analysis is incorrect, or it must be capable of being stated in the following theorem: Comic absurdity is of the same nature as that of dreams.

If you think about dreams, you’ll notice that only the ones which don’t carry emotional weight are funny. The rest disallow laughter.

(For more on Bergson’s idea of dreams, see his essay:  Dreams .)

- Most damning (disturbing) is the conclusion: Laughter is a corrective of society meant to punish the aberrant inflexible elements.

Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness. ...

Laughter punishes certain failing's somewhat as disease punishes certain forms of excess, striking down some who are innocent and sparing some who are guilty, aiming at a general result and incapable of dealing separately with each individual case. ...

In this sense, laughter cannot be absolutely just. Nor should it be kind-hearted either. Its function is to intimidate by humiliating.

But if you have come thus far, the very last paragraph of the book offers a memorable, poetic metaphor that illustrates why Bergson remains readable and worthwhile even for amateur philosophers more than a century after his time. Peaceful depths and truceless waves covered in feathery, frolicsome foam—society has never been described more attractively.

Here, as elsewhere, nature has utilised evil with a view to good. It is more especially the good that has engaged our attention throughout this work. We have seen that the more society improves, the more plastic is the adaptability it obtains from its members; while the greater the tendency towards increasing stability below, the more does it force to the surface the disturbing elements inseparable from so vast a bulk; and thus laughter performs a useful function by emphasising the form of these significant undulations. Such is also the truceless warfare of the waves on the surface of the sea, whilst profound peace reigns in the depths below. The billows clash and collide with each other, as they strive to find their level. A fringe of snow-white foam, feathery and frolicsome, follows their changing outlines. From time to time, the receding wave leaves behind a remnant of foam on the sandy beach. The child, who plays hard by, picks up a handful, and, the next moment, is astonished to find that nothing remains in his grasp but a few drops of water, water that is far more brackish, far more bitter than that of the wave which brought it. Laughter comes into being in the self-same fashion. It indicates a slight revolt on the surface of social life. It instantly adopts the changing forms of the disturbance. It, also, is afroth with a saline base. Like froth, it sparkles. It is gaiety itself. But the philosopher who gathers a handful to taste may find that the substance is scanty, and the after-taste bitter.

Thank you and good night.

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bergson's writing is quite lovely and literary, while simultaneously being clear, and not too far astray from making points. If it weren't for my already coming in with a pet hypothesis regarding the nature of laughter which is at ends with Bergson's, perhaps I could be more convinced by his view, and more pleased by this book. But given my bias, I found myself seeing his points as haphazard, inelegant observations, which could be explained, and unified, by the pet hypothesis I've been harboring.

Bergson's account of the comic—an explanation for why we laugh and what laughter means ultimately—is that it arises from when our baseline expectation for life to be adaptable, malleable, and dynamic, is challenged, in the face of seeing something that seems to be mechanistic, automatic, or determined. This is on top of another necessary condition for the comic: what we see we take to be a human phenomenon, or an expression of some human behavior or activity (e.g., we can laugh at a piece of artwork, but not at a landscape).

For example, usually if someone is hunched over, it is because he is sore or trying to look smaller, which might be appropriate or caused by certain environmental circumstances. He'd straighten back up, once those circumstances change. But a person with a bodily form that lends to him being called a 'hunchback' cannot straighten up. In that case, his being hunched over isn't an organic response to the dynamic, changing world, but it is a fated condition, which he cannot control. Bergson thinks that we will laugh at seeing a person called a hunchback, in light of this. In contrast, we do not find funny kinds of human deformity which do not have the outward appearance of some form that most anyone is able to contort their body into (e.g., if a person had more than two eyes). This fact, according to Bergson, reflects that we can find only what strikes us as an expression of human activity funny.

Here's another example: a person's vice is funny only if it is simple and systematic enough, so that it strikes us as a character trait that can be appreciated in the abstract, above and beyond this person's individuality, and moreover, it seems to 'fate' or mechanistically determine the person's behavior. In contrast, vices which are too complex so that we can't isolate it from the person's individuality seem to be integrated into their agency to us, and we don't find this funny, but rather only tragic or dramatic.

Why do we laugh when we see obstinacy/automaticity, in place of our expectation of malleable/adaptable behavior? According to Bergson, this is our way of coping with, or moving on from, a condition which is intrinsically unpalatable to us. In order for we animals to survive, and for society to get along, we need to be adaptable. When in fact someone lacks adaptability in a certain context, we'll laugh at it, sort of like a defense mechanism; there's nothing they or us can do about this rigidity, and so we'll now see it from an aesthetic, detached perspective. Laughter in effect makes the object laughed at into a sort of aesthetic object, so we are no longer considering it from a practical angle, and are worried or concerned with what to do now. We can take a break.

When Bergson gets into this point, he says some pretty interesting things. He points out that, for example in the hunchback case, while it strikes us that someone is voluntarily hunching himself over, we know by reason that this is not the case. This fact suggests that "the imagination" may paint pictures of reality to us, which come apart from the reality that we know by "reason." Bergson talks about this in terms of there being distinct "logics," one of which belongs to the imagination, and the other which belongs to reason. I think this is a fascinating proposal, but unfortunately Bergson doesn't explore it any further. It leaves us hanging with the questions: What are the distinctive principles or features of what imagination v. reason presents to us? In other words, what are the deets when it comes to the differences between their "logics"? Moreover, how do the two interact? What are the underlying mental processes that are responsible for the domains glossed over in the crude terms "imagination" and "reason"?

It seems to me that Bergson's observation is an attempt to connect up the dots, when a broader array of dots, which naturally give rise to a certain pattern, is obscured from sight. I'm prone to think (given stuff I've been thinking about generally of late) that laughter is closely tied to our playing games of make-believe (cf. Kendall Walton, Paul L. Harris). According to this philosopher and psychologist, it is onto- and phylo-genetically primitive that we can engage in pretense/make-believe, and that we are sensitive to that the imagined world that we inhabit, while we're making-believe, is unreal, in contrast to the actual world, of our bodies and imaginative processes and props, that we necessarily inhabit, from which we engage in make-believe at all.

It seems to me that the examples Bergson raises and explains in terms of his explanation hinging upon the distinction between the mechanical v. malleable crucially involve features which would provoke the relevant participants to step out of a practically-engaged, real-life mode, and enter a make-believe mode. For example, when one sees the hunchback, one's imagination first conjures the appearance that it is a man voluntarily hunched over. This appearance is registered as erroneous, which makes a person sensitive to the difference between that which is merely imagined and that which is real. In this case, of course, one does not voluntarily engage in a game of make-believe, but in effect, what one's imagination automatically paints before one's eyes is registered as make-believe, in a comparable manner to how figments of the imagination that arise from voluntarily making-believe are registered. This discrepancy between what appears as unreal, and what is known to be real, brings one into a mental state that is functionally equivalent to the overall state that obtains whenever we play games of make-believe. It is from this mode of experience of make-believe that we can then appreciate what's before our eyes in this "aesthetic" way, which Bergson nicely raises.

The difference between Bergson's explanation and mine is significant. My explanation shows that it is not just when we see a discrepancy between the mechanical v. malleable that we laugh. It is just that, contingently, when we see this discrepancy, we're often triggered to then enter a make-believe mode of experiencing the world. But there are many other sorts of conditions that can trigger this entrance. For example, when we are sensitive to a genre-context of some artifact that indicates it is fiction rather than nonfiction, we'd be more likely to find the contents funny.

Of course, make-believe is not co-extensive with the comic. It's still a mystery to me what the further conditions are that tilt any ordinary case of make-believe into the outright funny. Maybe Bergson is onto something with his overall distinction between the mechanistic v. malleable, but I was not convinced by his work that our sensitivity to that distinction is necessary for the comic.

As a whole, I wonder whether contemplation on this question of the comic would be of aid in my project for making sense of the distinction between manifest reality and unreality (of which playing games of make-believe is a subset, but perhaps also a paradigmatic case, in the sense that the set as a whole requires certain features or functional roles as make-believe). Walton and Harris focus on artwork and aesthetics mostly for thinking through this distinction. The comic seems to relate to the aesthetic in complicated and strange ways; many real life situations, rather than artworks, provoke laughter, and many artworks fail to provoke laughter. I'll think more about this later

[Tomáš Valenta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Že bych rozuměl a plně pochopil a zpracoval všechno, co Bergsson píše, to nemůžu říct. Mám pocit, že mi v jím představované teorii komična některé momenty neseděly, trochu drhnuly a asi bych byl schopný je více rozebrat, kdybych měl papír a tužku, ale kdo na to má čas?
Knihu jsem si jinak velmi užil, bylo zajímavé zkusit trochu poodstoupit a zamyslet se nad něčím, co se mi zdá tak přirozené, jako je smích a pokusit se vysledovat a identifikovat jednotlivé předstírané myšlenky i v každodenním životě.
Rád bych napsal něco moudřejšího, ale jak už jsem řekl, nemyslím, že jsem knihu na první přečtení opravdu pochopil, a tak nevím, jaké by to moudro bylo kvality.

[Silvia · Rating 2 out of 5]

*Read it for UNI*

Could be interesting but I'm not into non-fiction so it was kind of boring for me. The main topic didn't catch my interest at all.

[Francisco Pais De Sousa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime obra esta, que analisa as condições de emergência do riso e o que este significa!

O livro não é especulativo na abordagem, rejeitando uma definição geral mais ou menos exigente. Torna-se tangível pela pesquisa entre o cómico de situação, linguagem e de personagem.

Como leitor, noto o surgimento de uma definição posterior ou, melhor, uma condição de existência para o riso brutal e geral: o confronto do sujeito com a realidade da vida humana e da “rigidez” - categoria empregada pelo autor - das determinações da vida humana.

Agradável, profundo mas bem escrito, este livro apela ao “espírito”, a característica humana que abrange o humor.

[zeynep karababa · Rating 2 out of 5]

gülme üzerine olan bir kitap nasıl bu kadar sıkıcı olabilir.

yalan yok, öne sürülen bazı fikirler gerçekten ilginçti ama kitap gülmeyi veya komik olana çok kısıtlı bir açıdan bakıyor. bergson gülmeyi ayrıksıyı cezalandırma aracı, bir alay yöntemi olarak görüyor. kitapta gülmenin toplumdaki birleştirici gücüne hiç değinilmiyor. bilmiyorum belki bu kısıtlı bakışı kitabın yayınlanmasından beri geçen 123 yıla veya fransızların bayağı mizah anlayışına bağlanabilir.

[Kaplumbağa Felsefecisi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kitap düşünürken yazılmış gibi bir havada ilerliyor, galiba sadece sonuç bölümü tatmin edici diyebilirim. Hayvan ya da cisimlerde güldüğümüz şeylerin insansı şeyler olması konusuna değiniyor. İnsanın da doğal neden sonuçları şaşırttığında komiğe yaklaştığını. Karşındaki insanın bunu daha evvel düşünüp kurguladığını düşündüğün ama bundan çok da emin olamadığın anlar gibi.. Biraz matematiksel bir durum gibi gelmeye başladı kitabı okuduktan sonra. Espiri yeteneğimi kaybettiğimi düşündüğüm şu günlerde tam beklentilerimi karşılamasa da biraz bu konuya kafa yormamı sağladı diyebilirim.

[Kas Molenaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoewel ik denk dat Bergson meerdere verschijningsvormen van het lachen vergeet of buitensluit, en wel een vrij duistere interpretatie van de functie van het lachen heeft, is het een indrukwekkende analyse, die een specifieke vorm van (de functie van) lachen indrukwekkend nauwkeurig vat.

[csenge birizlo · Rating 4 out of 5]

igazából nem nevettem

[Ekster Alven · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Could reality come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves, probably art would be useless, or rather we should all be artists, for then our soul would continually vibrate in perfect accord with nature. Our eyes, aided by memory, would carve out in space and fix in time the most inimitable of pictures. Hewn in the living marble of the human form, fragments of statues, beautiful as the relics of antique statuary, would strike the passing glance. Deep in our souls we should hear the strains of our inner life's unbroken melody,—a music that is ofttimes gay, but more frequently plaintive and always original. All this is around and within us, and yet no whit of it do we distinctly perceive.
...
Mostly, however, we perceive nothing but the outward display of our mental state. We catch only the impersonal aspect of our feelings, that aspect which speech has set down once for all because it is almost the same, in the same conditions, for all men. Thus, even in our own individual, individuality escapes our ken. We move amidst generalities and symbols, as within a tilt-yard in which our force is effectively pitted against other forces; and fascinated by action, tempted by it, for our own good, on to the field it has selected, we live in a zone midway between things and ourselves, externally to things, externally also to ourselves. From time to time, however, in a fit of absentmindedness, nature raises up souls that are more detached from life. Not with that intentional, logical, systematical detachment—the result of reflection and philosophy—but rather with natural detachment, one innate in the structure of sense or consciousness, which at once reveals itself by a virginal manner, so to speak, of seeing, hearing or thinking. Were this detachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world has never yet seen. It would excel alike in every art at the same time; or rather, it would fuse them all into one. It would perceive all things in their native purity: the forms, colours, sounds of the physical world as well as the subtlest movements of the inner life."

"But utility demands that these outbursts should be foreseen and averted. Man must live in society, and consequently submit to rules. And what interest advises, reason commands: duty calls, and we have to obey the summons. Under this dual influence has perforce been formed an outward layer of feelings and ideas which make for permanence, aim at becoming common to all men, and cover, when they are not strong enough to extinguish it, the inner fire of individual passions. The slow progress of mankind in the direction of an increasingly peaceful social life has gradually consolidated this layer, just as the life of our planet itself has been one long effort to cover over with a cool and solid crust the fiery mass of seething metals. But volcanic eruptions occur. And if the earth were a living being, as mythology has feigned, most likely when in repose it would take delight in dreaming of these sudden explosions, whereby it suddenly resumes possession of its innermost nature. Such is just the kind of pleasure that is provided for us by drama."

[El Bibliófilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

My comments in video: https://youtu.be/ugF5x7X6kww

Here I am going to talk about the reflections that the work of the French philosopher generated in me. I decided to focus on a contribution with a definition of laughter that I was building as I was reading, and that is why it contrasts point by point what the author has elaborated. I would like you to comment on how pertinent my observations or my definition are. Would they deserve to write a book? Greetings

Acá voy a hablar de las reflexiones que me generó la obra del filosofo francés. Decidí enfocarme a una contribución con una definición de la risa que fui construyendo a medida que iba leyendo, y que por eso contrasta punto por punto lo elaborado por el autor. Me gustaría que comentaran que tan pertinentes resultan mis observaciones o mi definición. Ameritarían escribir un libro?. Saludos

[Francisco · Rating 5 out of 5]

He leído sobre filosofía y también sobre teoría de la literatura pero el humor es bien esquivo. La mayoría de los comediantes evitan tomarse el género mismo en serio, al menos en público y se estudia en pocos lugares. Eso implica que ignoramos un montón respecto a lo cómico.

Bergson en este libro trata de responder a la pregunta de qué es lo cómico y cómo se fabrica esa comicidad (por qué nos reímos) y lo hace en serio pero con un lenguaje sencillo. Parte definiendo lo cómico en general y luego el humor físico, verbal y el del carácter (de personajes) usando ejemplos.

Es un ensayo que puede servir para aprender los fundamentos del humor y tiene algunas fórmulas que son infalibles pero no es exactamente una guía para llegar y hacer una rutina. Tampoco es un libro de chistes, aunque como dije sí contiene algunos ejemplos.

Hay muchas perlas interesantes aquí pero me llamó especialmente la atención que la risa esté conectada con la corrección del comportamiento, lo que tiene una cierta conexión con lo moral (al final lo que hace reír es lo que escapa de lo normativo). O cómo la risa tiene que ser insensible para conseguir el efecto deseado. Por eso pienso que un humor políticamente correcto es contraproducente: Te impide señalar lo ridículo y rigidiza justamente a aquello que está para distenderlo. El comercial de Campofrío de este año es un buen ejemplo de ese punto.

"La indiferencia es su medio natural. La risa no tiene mayor enemigo que la emoción. No quiero decir que nosotros no nos podamos reir de una persona que nos inspira piedad [...] solamente que entonces , por algunos instantes, será necesario olvidar ese afecto, hacer callar a esa piedad."

"[Lo cómico] Expresa entonces una imperfección individual y colectiva que llama a la corrección inmediata. La risa es esa corrección misma. La risa es un cierto gesto social que señala y reprime una precisa distracción especial de los hombres y de los acontecimientos."

[Margarita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Parece absurdo tratar de estudiar la naturaleza ontológica del concepto de "la risa" y " lo cómico" dado que parece algo implícito en el ser humano, sin embargo resulta ser mucho más complejo.
Bergson trata de definir la risa deconstruyendola y entender sus distintos elementos. Habla por ejemplo de su naturaleza necesariamente social, igualmente discute la idea de lo que es cómico, ya sea una yuxtaposición de ideas, la degradación o caricaturizacion de una idea elevada.
La redacción del autor llega a ser pesada en ocasiones, lo cual me hizo perder la atención pero a fin de cuentas, resultan muy estimulantes los planteamientos que propone. A pesar de ser un texto escrito en los setentas, los fundamentos de lo cómico parecen replicarse hasta el día de hoy (en parte) y justamente el pensar constantemente en ejemplos de mi propio contexto y bagaje cultural (ej. Memes, sitcoms, shows de stand up, etc. ) es parte de lo que me resultó más estimulante.
Buscarle a la risa una dimensión filosófica y sociológica resulta en una discusión que tiene cavida para temas más universales como el arte y el lenguaje.

[Cosmin-Teodor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Printre rândurile prezentei lucrări se află perspective cu totul străine cunoaşterii mele de până acum, asupra noțiunilor de artă, natură, rigiditate, repetiție, calități, defecte, vanitate, sentiment şi emoție, toate fiind privite ca izvoare ale comicului.
Tragedia se naşte din tainele sufletului, personajele angajate în acțiune fiind prelungiri ale autorului lor sau ceea ce autorul ar fi putut fi dacă drumul său sentimental ar fi luat o altă formă în viață. Nu aşa stau lucrurile însă, în cazul Comediei: ea îşi găseşte începutul din ceea ce ne înconjoară şi este uman, căci nimic din ce este rizibil nu se află în conştient şi în emoții.
Râsul are un caracter sancționator. El este menit să îndrepte, să corecteze defectele şi obişnuințele societății. Iată adevărata mască a simbolului teatral.

[Argos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aradığımı bulamadığım bir kitap. Gülme eylemi ve insanlar neden gülüyor sorusu üzerine bir çok şey söylüyor yazar ama söylemedikleri, cevabını veremediği sorular söylediklerinden daha fazla. Sonuçta gülmenin materyalist yanının olmadığı metafizik açıklamayla yorumlanabileceği kanaatine varmış Bergson. Aslında çoğu felsefecinin yaptığı gibi bol soru az cevap durumu bu kitapta da var. Kitabı okuyunca mizah kavramının bu kitapta kapsam harici tutulduğunu hissettim. Neyse ki 100 sayfalık kolay okunur bir kitaptı, zorlamadı beni, yine de öncelikli kitaplara almasaydım dedim.

[Mélanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mais le rire, en fait, c'est quoi ? Voilà une question qu'on ne se pose pas forcément tellement ce phénomène semble naturel et ancré dans notre quotidien. Et pourtant, nous allons nous rendre compte dans ce livre, qu'il s'agit d'un comportement social et mécanique propre à une culture. A travers cet essai, Henri Bergson nous offre une fine analyse, non pas du rire à proprement parlé, mais de la raison pour la quelle on rit, les caractéristiques et les procédés. Un livre pas vraiment comique mais absolument captivant !

[BonGard]

ترجمه فارسی از عباس باقری رو خوندم
برگسون دست رو مفاهیم جالبی برای پژوهش گذاشته و خنده هم جزو هموناست، مسلمن خوندنش رو پیشنهاد میدم بخصوص برای کسایی که حتی به چیزی مثل خنده هم بخان با لنز نظریه نگاه کنن