Quotations from Chapter 1
What follows are a series of quotations chosen, almost at random, as they struck me, from Henri Bergson's On Laughter. These are from the first of the three chapters.
What does laughter mean?
..we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing.
It dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group. can it then fail to throw light for us on the way the human imagination works..?
.. the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.
Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.
Try for a moment, to become interested in every that is being said and done; act in imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. ow step aside, look upon life as a distinguished spectator: many a drama will turn into 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. How many human actions would stand a similar test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anaesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to the intelligence, pure and simple.
Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all we must determine the utility of its function, which is a social one.
A man running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing. they would not laugh at him, I imagine, could they suppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on the ground. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary... The laughable element .. consists of a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being.
Is it then surprising that the absent-minded individual ... has usually fired the imagination of comic authors? ..Don Quixote...
What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation, together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt ourselves in consequence.
Laughter must be something of this kind, a sort of social gesture. By the fear which it inspires, it restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into their shell and go to sleep, and , in short, softens down whatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical inelasticity... This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.
Where does a ridiculous expression of the face come from? ...Suppose, then, that we intensify ugliness to the point of deformity, and study the transition from the deformed to the ridiculous. ...By toning down a deformity that is laughable, we ought to obtain an ugliness that is comic. A laughable expression of the face, then, is one that will make us think of something rigid and, so to speak, coagulated, in the wonted mobility of the face.
Automatism, inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and maintained, are clearly the causes why a face makes us laugh..
We shall now understand the comic element in caricature. However regular we may imagine a face to be, however harmonious its lines and supple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether perfect: there will always be discoverable the signs of some impending bias, the vague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short some favourite distortion towards which nature seems to be particularly inclined. The art of the caricaturist consists in detecting this..and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it.
...our imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth which attracts it.
| 'How easy it is for garment to become ridiculous'. (p.25) |
I
What does laughter mean?
..we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing.
It dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group. can it then fail to throw light for us on the way the human imagination works..?
.. the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.
Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.
Try for a moment, to become interested in every that is being said and done; act in imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. ow step aside, look upon life as a distinguished spectator: many a drama will turn into 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. How many human actions would stand a similar test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anaesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to the intelligence, pure and simple.
Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all we must determine the utility of its function, which is a social one.
II
A man running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing. they would not laugh at him, I imagine, could they suppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on the ground. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary... The laughable element .. consists of a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being.
Is it then surprising that the absent-minded individual ... has usually fired the imagination of comic authors? ..Don Quixote...
What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation, together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt ourselves in consequence.
Laughter must be something of this kind, a sort of social gesture. By the fear which it inspires, it restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into their shell and go to sleep, and , in short, softens down whatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical inelasticity... This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.
III
Where does a ridiculous expression of the face come from? ...Suppose, then, that we intensify ugliness to the point of deformity, and study the transition from the deformed to the ridiculous. ...By toning down a deformity that is laughable, we ought to obtain an ugliness that is comic. A laughable expression of the face, then, is one that will make us think of something rigid and, so to speak, coagulated, in the wonted mobility of the face.
Automatism, inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and maintained, are clearly the causes why a face makes us laugh..
We shall now understand the comic element in caricature. However regular we may imagine a face to be, however harmonious its lines and supple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether perfect: there will always be discoverable the signs of some impending bias, the vague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short some favourite distortion towards which nature seems to be particularly inclined. The art of the caricaturist consists in detecting this..and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it.
...our imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth which attracts it.
IV
THE ATTITUDES, GESTURES AND MOVEMENTS OF THE HUMAN BODY ARE LAUGHABLE IN EXACT PROPORTION AS THAT BODY REMINDS US OF A MERE MACHINE.
The originality of a comic artist is thus expressed in the special kind of life he imparts to a mere puppet.
V
Something mechanical encrusted on the living, will represent a cross [=junction] at which we must halt, a central image from which the imagination branches off in [three] different directions.
We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing.
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