Laughter (book)

As Mark Sinclair comments in Bergson (2020): with this essay 'Bergson belongs to the small number of major philosophers to have addressed in depth the topic of laughter and the comic as its source'.

[2] The three essays were first published in the French review Revue de Paris.

It was reprinted in 1959 by the Presses Universitaires de France, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Bergson.

He specifies that his method does not contradict the results of the other one, but he assumes that it is more rigorous from a scientific point of view.

The English translation by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, was first published in 1911 and went through several editions to 2005.

The first essay is made up of three parts: In a short introduction, Bergson announces that he will try to define the comic, but he does not want to give a rigid definition of the word; he wants to deal with the comic as part of human life.

Life is defined by Bergson as a perpetual movement; it is characterized by flexibility and agility.

This is why Bergson asserts that laughter has a moral role; it is a factor of uniformity of behaviors, and it eliminates ludicrous and eccentric attitudes: "Beyond actions and attitudes that are automatically punished by their natural consequences, there remains a certain inflexibility of the body, of the mind and of the character that society would like to eliminate to obtain a greater elasticity and a better sociability of its members.

[citation needed] Bergson concludes as an immediate consequence of the previous chapter that "attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are subject to laughter precisely in the way that body makes us think to a simple machine".

There are three main directions in which our imagination is oriented to produce comic effects, three general laws: