Henri Bergson "Laughter" Review: Theory of Humor Series, part 28

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics, such as evolutionary literary criticism and the theory of humor. This being April Fools Day, I give you a post about humor. Enjoy.

In my investigation, I have read the following essay, and I will analyze it here.

Bergson, Henri. "Laughter" 1900. This essay can be found in many places.

(What self-respecting, or even self-denigrating, theorist of humor can go without commenting on the work of Henri Bergson? I mean, really!)

Bergson is usually included in the history of the theory of humor in part because he was in his day a well-respected philosopher, and not many philosophers have devoted some of their musings to humor. (One could say that humor is a-musing. Cue the rim-shot.) Bergson may also be popular in brief histories of the theory of humor because his theory is at times narrow. That narrowness makes it easy both to summarize and to criticize.

As a philosopher, Bergson heavily influenced Marcel Proust, so students of literature are more likely to read Bergson than to read other middling philosophers. (Bergson is no Plato.) Bergson's ideas are of especial interest to students of John Kennedy Toole because Proust influenced Evelyn Waugh, and Waugh in his turn influenced John Kennedy Toole.

Bergson begins his essay with a broad definition of humor which covers many cases and is similar to the theory that I have been using. (For my earlier blog entry summarizing my current theory of humor, click here.) However, Bergson, like any philosopher, then tries to fit all phenomena into his philosophical structure, and, in order to shoehorn humor into the framework, he has to narrow humor's scope. This narrower theory then obviously does not cover every possible case of humor, or even most cases. His theory starts out with promising validity across many instances of humor, but then it narrows and almost becomes a parody of itself. Despite its narrower form, for certain categories of humor, his theory hits the nail on the head (or on the thumb, as it were).

To put Bergson's ideas on humor into perspective, it helps to know something about the rest of his philosophy (though I am not an expert). He argues that human life is driven by a life-force, or a vitality. Mechanical devices lack vitality. Bergson wrote at a time when the industrial working conditions for the European proletariet were particularly brutal. It was at a time when Marx wrote that the worker was alienated from his own existence, and Bergson argued that the industrial existence of so many workers was being drained of vitality. Chaplin's movie Modern Times exemplifies this perspective.

In Bergson's system, humor is generated by envisioning a human being as a physical object without inner life or vitality. The man slipping on the banana peel ceases to be human and becomes merely a physical object, crashing to the ground. The person who goes through life acting robotically is ridiculous. (As Ionescu said, "If you want to turn tragedy into comedy, speed it up.") The ridicule and laughter are social cues to that person to correct his behavior; they signal to the person to stop operating like a robot on autopilot.

There are many aspects of this theory that work well. First, there is incongruity. The dichotomy between "human as a dignified personage" and "human as airborne object" often lead to competing linguistic scripts and incongruities. Second, there is disparagement. The physical human as object has less dignity than the person as a social actor in the abstract, and the sudden reminder of our physical nature has an aspect of belittlement. Third, there is a social function. The idea that laughter has a role to correct or modify behavior acknowledges humor's social functions.

However, it should be clear that many instances of humor do not fall into Bergson's narrow, mechanistic definition of what is funny (dry wit for example). Further, Bergson--convinced of the correctness of his entire philosophical system--insists that only this class of events are humorous. In a sense, his obsessive views themselves become comical. While his appeal to creativity and vitality are appealing--and his special class of events really are funny (just watch a Charlie Chaplin movie)--it is easy for even a two-bit critic like myself to refute his attempt at a comprehensive theory of humor.

Désolé Henri, pas de cigare!