Laughter

An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

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About this book

Shared laughter gives Henri Bergson a way to examine how people think and behave together. In this philosophical essay, he starts with the human features of comedy, the temporary distance from feeling that allows amusement, and the sense of belonging among those who laugh. His examples move between everyday observation and the theatre, connecting an audience's response to the customs and expectations of a social group.

The discussion follows comic effects through movement, situations, words and character. In examples from Daudet and Labiche, Bergson considers how separate chains of events collide, how repetition works, and how living behaviour can take on the rigidity of a mechanism. These close readings give readers interested in drama, language or philosophy a vocabulary for considering why a scene becomes funny. The English translation by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell was revised by Bergson himself.

About the author

Henri Bergson

Bergson argued that time as it is lived cannot be the divisible quantity physics measures, and gave it a name, durée. Creative Evolution added the élan vital, a drive running through evolution for which mechanism alone could not account.