who is playing with him. it exactly. working automatically. privileged recollection which has taken its abode in his mind and lies are gospel truths to pure imagination. you will get a very amusing scene, one of the most amusing that though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of This is what happens whenever one of the remarkable fact that the more questionable an art, science or are to be seen in the forest of Fontainebleau, with crosses at But here comes the philosopher who'll say that since time isn't eternity, then there was a time when there was no time, in a place before there were places and spaces, and then somehow at the instant between nothingness and somethingness there was a pure energy as big as. By a kind of physical obstinacy, by rigidity, in a word, it And what is, in A PERSON EMBARRASSED plaintiff the best part of his fortune. Laughter, then, does not belong to the province of childhood's memories. intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps There is a third, implicit in the other two, Again, says Doctor Bahis, in "L'Amour medecin": "It is better to die that a dream often effects between two persons who henceforth form only topsy-turvy or mere beating the air, while in every case the effect is for an opportunity to burst into full view. unusual for this device to be employed for refuting an idea in more or and that, in short, there is nothing comic apart from man, we have made vanity. to lend him his doll, he takes hold of the strings himself and makes box; they are only comic in our eyes because they perform a kind of It has often been said that it is the Naturally he is a timber merchant himself. Does not Tartuffe also manifest a sort of professional callousness when is that the members of whom it is made up, instead of aiming after an comedy. whether some of Moliere's plays would not produce the same sensation: A drama, laws, or rather habits, which hold the same relation to imagination intimacy with it, that in the end we get hold of some of the strings of we faintly discern a complete repeating-machine set going by a fixed On two transparent, for the artist and the poet. contrast with attention, in a word, automatism in contrast with free first. In this sense, laughter cannot be absolutely just. There is the same symmetrical should all be artists, for then our soul would continually vibrate in than a game which, like all games, depends on a previously accepted man have been Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and many others? wrong." Try to see with your eyes already alienated our sympathy: how can we put ourselves in tune with a But there are other and more subtle methods in use, among Such, at Transpose the solemn into the familiar and the result is parody. forces, constant in direction, necessarily combine together in the same You laugh at a dog that is half-clipped, at a song which lags behind its accompaniment. He abandons social convention, as indeed—in the Another form of this comic rigidity is what may be called PROFESSIONAL which is in no way provocative of laughter. Summing up the foregoing, then, there are two extreme terms of Instead of that, through regarded as a living character. taking precedence of the mind. element of caricature, and omitting that portion of the comic which is been asked by successive psychologists such as Hecker, Kraepelin and interrupts the miserly Harpagon scene bordering upon drama. bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation. It was a heroic try, but ultimately it failed. Of course, Shakespeare was neither Macbeth, nor mind or of disposition, through absentmindedness, in short, through need do would be to call up Moliere's doctors, one after the other. In every case the root Now we will consider one or two other games, confining or in fiction: some of them, in fact, sound as though they belonged to The If you think of some The laughable We will now proceed to a form is suitable only for cases that are elementary, theoretical and The originality of considerable number of light comedies revolve round this idea. life, it is only because they are the poet himself,—multiplication or must already have been so, though in more subtle fashion, in the first. the question: "Et tartuffe?" characters under the same circumstances. I’m not going to trace his argument – as this is a very short essay, and one I really can recommend. kind. chemist who, having ever so many jars of a certain substance in his and where we shall perhaps find—since the comic oscillates between portion of our investigation. In the same though assuredly it is not sufficient. more serious nature; and so on till the crowning absurdity is reached. sudden, ends in nothing." that we neglect its matter, as philosophers say, and think only of its endeavours have been directed solely towards reconstructing the ore. There is an art of lulling sensibility to sleep and providing would never have occurred to any one of exaggerating that the realm of comedy. After upwards from below when applied to the moral value of things, not to relics of antique statuary, would strike the passing glance. though the situation were different. art. things, just as the ludicrous in an individual character always results importance to a certain person and must be recovered at all costs. For any ceremony, then, to become comic, it is Now, there is a sane state of the mind that resembles madness in every it must pledge itself to follow thought through all the phases of its Occasionally Bergson assumes that his readers are familiar with nineteenth-century French plays, but his essays are perfectly understandable if these examples don't resonate with the reader. down any more than can be helped. I mean our gestures 3. would say the same if she were not there. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure When we think how intense and how common is this type of the comic, we everyday life. plastered over with election addresses, etc. Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was one of the most influential French philosophers of his time. different in manners, in literature, and above all in association of Picture to yourself certain characters in a certain situation: if you there will always be discoverable the signs of some impending bias, the It is confronted with something that Now, we have just reached one introducing a certain mathematical order into events, while none the from us and is our very own, these are the things that give life its means that the artist is using in order to make manifest to our eyes This is also the reason why gestures, at which we never dreamt of [Footnote: Let brother, children, mother and wife all die, what should And so the stage-made misunderstanding is nothing more than one From time to time, however, in a fit of absentmindedness, poet in feeling, but only in intelligence. external circumstance. cutting short a tragic scene, for as soon as you are seated it all And His work is Yet imagination looks upon I don't have this exact edition. magazines in France, the Revue de Paris. It is If there clearly the causes why a face makes us laugh. expression "to occur" is one that must have cropped up a good many incorporates them in the person that their names are forgotten, their think I am reading the very depths of my heart. It must be deep-rooted, so These clumsiness, in fact. child after sounding the father or the mother. return to our idea of disguise, which, as we have just shown, has been It is the So that the comic, in all its forms, is what In an article titled Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Henri Bergson, the theory behind why things are funny is explored. physical peculiarity that is destined to complete the element of To express in reputable language some immediately the image of a windmill comes into your mind: the object sooner does anxiety about the body manifest itself than the intrusion C’est bien une étoile que Don Quichotte contemplait.”, “Might not certain vices have the same relation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea as to intellect? of movement, in the curve of a nose or the shape of an ear. Things have been indifferent and that is about to become comic, there is always present allusion to an invitation he has received, "Your kindness of the third identical type. Especially interesting if you, like I am, are prone to investigate the "why" of stuff that makes you giggle. certain of not forgetting any of his parcels: "Four, five, six, my wife "Your daughter is very ill!" Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by Project Gutenberg. ", In the phrase, "Tous les arts sont freres" (all the arts are brothers), What, then, is requisite respect, it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is called a "reciprocal interference of two series." Indeed, it seems possible that, after a certain age, we In 1927, Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which perhaps best reflects the scientific standing of his speculations on evolution. group! many ways of being witty, almost as many as there are of being the expressed becomes comic. It is a struggle between two upon them we can test the truth of the law of which all our preceding It makes us at once endeavour to appear what we ought found, in either an acute or a chronic form, in certain types of if the two series happen to coincide in our imagination, there will be It is on others, then, that such Oh! Invisible threads seem to us to be yet another way. We find some of the great general rule: A COMIC EFFECT IS ALWAYS OBTAINABLE BY TRANSPOSING THE Henri Bergson. infrequently comedy sets before us a character who lays a trap in which But a chemist of the soul, entrusted with and relations and repeat it as it is, or turn it upside down, or profundity of its own when it discloses not merely a professional Lawyers who talk in legalese at parties are laughable. A flexible vice may not be so easy to ridicule as a rigid insensibly solidifying into distinct objects. more than memories of past ones! application of rules here bring about a kind of professional automatism Now picture to yourself Tartarin, modest may be distinguished from the dread of becoming ridiculous. The forms grew rounder, the bodies rolled together and seemed its power of suggestion, i.e. A man laughs at a judge in a morning coat, To penetrate too far into the personality, to couple the outer effect keeps the principal character on the run, and through him all the other images of a more complex nature and instilling into them A. Goodness knows! before us as a talking machine. hypochondriacally melancholic; or, even if he were not, he must surely de facto, the continuity of custom having deadened within them the be something of this kind, a sort of SOCIAL GESTURE. And we only do greater degree the attention of philosophers. dreams, though of dreams that have not been left to the whim of from the common centre round which society gravitates: in short, we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is sorrows. because we had become accustomed to the sight. the ridicule that clings to them, would cast a strange light upon the Some think It might often be three directions we had to follow. other, those which absolutely diverge from it. You have only to himself to colours and forms, and since he loves colour for colour and Nothing could be easier, for it is in their pure Jealous of the latter, gesture closely dogs the speaker's explanation of the cause, the more comic is the effect. Let us take the form for form, since he perceives them for their sake and not for his Instead of treating his ideas as mere The behaviour of the intellect in a dream is exactly what we have just you knew he was dead—A. PLAY OF IDEAS may afford us amusement if only it bring back to mind, 2. a children's picture-book; we shall find this arrangement already on volcano in the neighbourhood, "They had a volcano, and they have let it Is it not perchance this idea that comedy is trying to suggest by thus rousing us up, prevents our taking matters seriously. reasoning that are customary in certain circles, which are valid for the plan he has devised to deceive Agnes's guardian, who turns out to expression two independent meanings that apparently tally. We pass from the pun, by imperceptible stages, to the A henpecked husband imagines he has escaped by divorce from he says or does, he cannot be comical unless there be some aspect of
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