Quotations from Chapter 3

The comic in character


Convinced that laughter has a social meaning and import, that the comic expresses, above all else, a special lack of adaptability to society, and that, in short, there is nothing comic apart from man, we have made man and character generally our main objective.


Comedy can only begin where our neighbour's personality ceases to affect us. It begins, in fact, with what we might call a growing callousness to social life. Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own way without troubling himself about getting in touch with the rest of his fellow-beings.


Always rather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed, laughter is, really and truly, a kind of social 'ragging'.


In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbour, if not in his will, at least in his deed. This is the reason a comedy is far more like real life than a drama is. 


[people] make us laugh by reason of their unsociability rather than of their immorality.


[But] depict some fault, however trifling, in such a way as to arouse sympathy, fear or pity; the mischief is done, it is impossible for us to laugh.


... in order to prepare us for laughter, comedy utilises a method, the formula of which may be given as follows: Instead of concentrating our attention on actions, comedy directs it rather to gestures. By gestures we mean here the attitudes, the movements and even the language by which a mental state expresses itself outwardly... Gesture, thus defined, is profoundly different from action. Action is intentional or, at any rate, conscious; gesture slips out unawares, it is automatic. .. action is in exact proportion to the feeling that inspires it: the one gradually passes into the other... About gesture, however, there is something explosive, which awakes our sensibility when on the point of being lulled to sleep and, by this rousing us up, prevents our taking matters seriously. Thus, as soon as our attention is fixed on gesture and not on action, we are in the realm of comedy.


[Unsociability + emotional disengagement + automatism] are the essential conditions for laughter. In a vice, even in a virtue, the comic is that element by which the person unwittingly betrays himself - the involuntary gesture or the unconscious remark.


it is not uncommon for a comic character to condemn in general terms a certain line of conduct and immediately afterwards afford an example of it himself: for instance, M. Jourdain's teacher of philosophy flying into a  passion after inveighing against anger..


What is the object of art? Could reality come into 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.. Deep in our souls we should hear the strains of our inner life's unbroken melody, - a music that is oft-times 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. Between nature and ourselves a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and opaque to the common herd, - thin, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy wove that veil? Was it done in malice or in friendliness? We had to live, and life demands that we grasp things in their relations to our own needs. Life is action. Life implies the acceptance only of the utilitarian side of things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions: all other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred. I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear. But what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a selection made by my senses to serve as alight to my conduct; what I know of myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions. My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a practical simplification of reality. In the vision they furnish me of myself and things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised; ways are traced out for me in advance, along which my activity is to travel. These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod before me. Things have been classified with a view to the use I can derive from them. And it is this classification I can perceive, far more clearly than the colour and shape of things...The individuality of things escapes us, unless it is materially to our advantage to perceive it.


In short, we do not see the actual things themselves; in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them. This tendency, the result of need, has become even more pronounced under the influence of speech; for words - with the exception of proper nouns - denote genera...Not only external objects, but even our own metal states, are screened from us in their inmost, personal aspect, in the original life they possess. When we feel love or hatred, when we are gay or sad, is it really the feeling itself that reaches our consciousness with those innumerable fleeting shades of meaning and deep resounding echoes that make it something altogether our own? We should all, were it so, be novelists or poets or musicians.


[I shall stop here to be sure that this set of quotations reaches you in time for our meeting tomorrow. There are a further fifteen pages of the Bergson's Essay, but this seems an appropriate point to halt].

Rembrandt, portrait of Saskia