Laughter - Softcover

Bergson, Henri Louis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0982530935 ISBN 13: 9780982530931

Publisher: Atropos Press, 2010

Synopsis

----Henri Bergson is the author of numerous works including Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution and Time and Free Will. His work has been influential for many thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze. ----Drew Burk is a graduate and technical director at the European Graduate School. He is the translator of such philosophers as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and Paul Virilio. ----What does laughter mean? What is the fundamental element of the laughable? What common ground can be found between the grimace of a clown, a play on words, a similar situation in a burlesque and a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will invariably yield us the same essence from which so many different products borrow either their obtrusive odor or their delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle on down, have tackled this tiny problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away, escaping only to pop up again, as a lively challenge to philosophical speculation.

About this title

Review:

Clem Kadiddlehopper wore a funny hat. Even animals other than humans seem to laugh, because they, too, possess emotions. And sometimes, when you're by yourself, you just start giggling for no reason. But that's not funny. As Henri Bergson, proto-existentialist French philosopher and author of Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, would say, you can stop laughing now. We must rethink what tickles us. For Bergson, laughter is a purely intellectual response that serves the social purpose of assuaging discomfort over the unaccustomed and unexpected. We chuckle at Lucy attempting to wrap the bonbons speeding by on a candy-factory conveyor belt because she's stuck in one place, performing the same task over and over, and failing; we hope that in similar situations we could be more flexible. Bergson recaps: "Rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective."

Bergson's thinking typifies a peculiarly Gallic tendency to rationalize the apparently ephemeral and subjective (in this case, humor), discussing it in exquisitely rarefied language in order to assert that which defies common sense (a funny hat is not funny, laughter expresses no emotion, no one laughs alone) but partakes nonetheless of a logical inevitability. Laughter, first published in 1911, clearly draws upon the early years of European modernism, yet also prefigures the movement in some ways. In recognizing the comic as it embodies itself in a "rigid," absentminded person, locked into repetitious, socially awkward behavior, Bergson--even as he looks backward, primarily to Molière--seems to be spawning the sophisticated visual and physical comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd; the transformation of Léger's figures into anthropoid machines; and Nijinsky's starring role in Stravinsky's satirical clockwork ballet Pétrouchka.

This little book resurrects a British translation that has long been out of print. While Laughter won't quite explain why the French love Jerry Lewis, or keep you in stitches, it's a bracing read that will make you think twice about laughing the next time someone stumbles into a lamppost. --Robert Burns Neveldine

From the Publisher:

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About this edition

• Publisher: Atropos Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0982530935
• ISBN 13: 9780982530931
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 132