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Title: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Henri Bergson, Cloudesley Brereton, Fred Rothwell ISBN: 1-892295-02-4 Publisher: Green Integer Books Pub. Date: March, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.2 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Still profound after all these years
Comment: Why is a pun amusing? In brief, it treats something human as if it were something mechanical. Language is a way of conveying meanings from one human to another, and the most inflexible, most mechanical, most artifiial POSSIBLE way of looking at words is to classify them by their sound alone. That's precisely what a pun does.
When Mel Brooks is playing a Polish actor playing Hitler, he says: "All I want is peace. A little piece of Poland, a tiny piece of France...." That is amusing -- the juxtaposition of the vital and the mechanical.
More sophisticated jokes than such puns are based on the same juxtaposition. Here is one of Bergson's example, from a play by Labiche. "Just as M. Perrichon is getting into the railway carriage, he makes certain of not forgetting any of his parcels: 'Four, five, six, my wife seven, my daughter eight, and myself nine.'"
Rating: 4
Summary: first since Aristoteles
Comment: Bergson is the second philosopher who consider laughter and try to find out the reasons why we laugh. Aristoteles did also this in his book about comedy, but here we have a more modern view on it. I recommend this to all who are interested in why and from what we laugh.
Rating: 2
Summary: a labor to get through
Comment: Henri Bergson believed that to laugh was to correct. Only the intellectual laughed, one who was detached from emotion. Bergson's claim is that laughter requires an absence of emotion, yet at the same time throughout his essay he proved how laughter is always accompanied with emotion. Bergson's main thesis loses value in his assertion of the necessity of understanding another to laugh, his own attachment of emotion to laughter and his consistent contradiction of his points throughout the work. In the non-emotional world where Bergson resides pure-intelligences refrain from all tears but still participate in laughter. Laughter is a state of no emotion which those who understand the social and moral laws use as a tool. Of course one must have risen above emotion to use this tool. In fact according to Bergson it is impossible to laugh if one has emotion. The first problem to this thesis is found on pg. 11 where he is describing what is necessary for someone to laugh, "This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other intelligences." The idea that one individual can be in touch with another revolves around the essence of emotion. It is impossible to read another person without emotion.
Understanding and feeling another's perspective is the only way to be in touch with that person. Thus an intelligent person who apparently is the one who laughs is also the one who is in touch with others. Bergson goes on to further contradict himself as he reiterates later on that one must silence his/her emotions and rely only on intelligence. The most intelligent person according to Bergson is a laugher. He says, "Comedy can only begin at the point where our neighbors personality ceases to affect us." (121). Heaven help us if the most knowledgeable leaders of society are people without feeling for the person next door. Bergson himself adds emotion to laughter himself in a statement he writes on pg. 95. "If laughter were not always a pleasure and mankind did not pounce upon the slightest excuse for indulging in it." Does not the feeling of pleasure require an emotion? Pleasure is an emotion. Pleasure cannot be described appropriately without attaching the word feeling to it. One cannot be absent in feeling and then feel pleasure at the same time. Does one look for the slightest excuse to do something that brings them no feeling? According to Bergson it does.
Bergson's final statements about laughter also add emotion. Laughter is apparently gaiety on the outside and when one really comes to know it then it becomes bitter. How does one know gaiety? He/she feels it. How does one know bitterness? She/he feels it. What is emotion? It is simply being in a certain state of feeling. While discussing the cause of laughter interpersonally Bergson said this: "Or rather our body sympathizes...we put ourselves for a very short time in his place...if amused by anything laughable in him, invite him, in imagination to share his amusement with us"(175). All of the sudden laughter has become a sympathizing moment, it no longer is a point where we could care less about our neighbor. Then on the following page his argument changes again. "It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness." Within in a matter of two pages Bergson has labeled laughter as sympathizing and then without sympathy. If Bergson was able to make up his own mind about the nature of laughter perhaps he would be more convincing. Laughter sometimes holds no consideration for another person, Bergson is correct there. Where he has failed is in covering only one aspect of laughter. Although Bergson tried to describe laughter as something intended to humiliate, even he could not stick to his point. Laughter, in his writing, came with emotion no matter what way he attempted to get around it. His own writing destroyed his thesis as it smelled of laughter being an emotional experience.
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Title: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Peter Gay ISBN: 0393001458 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: June, 1963 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics by Henri Bergson ISBN: 0806504218 Publisher: Citadel Trade Pub. Date: September, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: On Humour (Thinking in Action) by Simon Critchley ISBN: 0415251214 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson, N. M. Paul, W. S. Palmer ISBN: 0942299051 Publisher: Zone Books Pub. Date: 08 November, 1990 List Price(USD): $16.50 |
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Title: Comedy: An Essay on Comedy by George Meredith, Wylie Sypher, Henri Bergson ISBN: 0801823277 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 1980 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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