Bergson’s philosophy of laughter
We see a man, nose stuck up with a sense of self-importance, walking down a street. He steps on a banana skin and falls. The sight makes us laugh.
Why?
Why is slapstick, the most basic form of comedy, funny? Do we laugh at it because it is, literally and metaphorically, a slap across the face of another? Is cruelty the basis of laughter? Does the funny business of laughter merit serious enquiry?
French academic Henri Bergson thought so. Before him, no philosopher had made a comprehensive study of why we laugh, and why laughter is necessary for us, both as individuals and for society as a whole.
In 1900 Bergson published his Essay on the Meaning of the Comic that created a seismic tremor in the world of thought, the reverberations of which continue to be felt to the present.
He noted that not only is the act of laughing confined to humans but so is the object of laughter. Today, for example, we laugh at the fat cat Garfield only because his greed and grouchy laziness humanise him.
Calling laughter ‘a living thing’, which ought to be given ‘the respect due to life’, Bergson was against ‘imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition…we shall confine ourselves to watching it expand and grow’.
Laughter is the ‘leitmotif’, the background music of evolving life. In his 1907 book, Creative Evolution , Bergson elaborated on laughter and its relationship to society and the individual. Humans are an amalgam of the material, the body, and the spirit, consciousness.
Matter represents a mechanistic rigidity, physical and mental, while the spirit which animates matter, what he calls the ‘elan vital’, is elastic, supple, as unfettered as the air we breathe, and the source of life.
Societies and individuals evolve when the spirit, like Prometheus unbound, breaks through the inflexible constraints of the material body and its innate inertness.
Bergson’s view of evolution was an inversion of Darwin’s. While Darwin conceived of evolution as a selection imposed on species by their ability, or lack of it, to cope with an external environment, to Bergson it was humankind’s spirit that ignited the spark of creativity and growth.
Society implies a ‘reciprocal adaptation’ between the whole and the individuals that compose it. Social bonding requires individuals, in their interactions, to exhibit ‘the greatest possible degree of elasticity’ and guard against ‘rigidity of body, mind, and character’.
Bergson argued that laughter is a corrective device, a steam valve on a pressure cooker, and a response to witnessing ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’.
When we observe a smug individual slip and fall on the street, our laughter is a response to the ‘adaptability and the living pliability of a human’ unexpectedly hijacked by a ‘mechanical inelasticity’ by which the body becomes a ‘cumbersome vesture…which holds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft’.
What Bergson would call the ‘mechanistic’ or inelastic, are the antievolutionary drawbacks of vanity, greed, and aggression, and are the targets of the darts of satiric humour.
Bergson’s advice? Take life in your stride. Just watch out for those banana skins. And if you do step on one, be the first to laugh at yourself.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
