LNAT Section A - Your Guide to the First Section of the LNAT

Passage 61 – Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic

By Henri Bergson, member of the Institute Professor at the College de France

What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable? What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque, and a scene of high comedy? The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem that has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation. Our excuse for attacking the problem in our turn must lie in the fact that we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing. We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible gradations from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the strangest metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. And maybe we may also find that we have made an acquaintance that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness. 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 that human imagination works, and more particularly social, collective and popular imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not also have something of its own to tell us about art and life?

At the outset, we shall put forward three observations which we look upon as fundamental. The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. 

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. 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 amusing, 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 intelligence, pure and simple.

This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other intelligences. And here is the third fact to which attention should be drawn. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. Perhaps it has happened to you, when seated in a railway carriage or at table d’hôte, to hear travellers relating to one another stories which must have been comic to them, as they laughed heartily. Had you been in their company, you would have laughed like them. But as you were not, you had no desire whatever to do so. 

To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural social environment and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a social signification.