Life's joke

Bergson, comedy, and the meaning of laughter

Russell Ford

pp. 175-193

in: Lydia Moland (ed), All too human, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

Despite its brevity and relative neglect in Bergson scholarship, the concerns of Bergson's little book Laughter extend to much more profound things than its title indicates. On the surface, its significance might seem to be symptomatic: laughter exposes something essentially human. But in the very first chapter, Bergson observes that laughter and the comic exclusively concern the human, but also "must have a social meaning." Bergson's very interest in laughter and the comic might well arise from the fact that the phenomenon of laughter indicates a social situation – denoted as the comic – in which human beings are both the source and the object of laughter. The comic situation gives laughter, as a sociological fact, a dual valence: humans laugh, but they only ever laugh at themselves.The present essay argues that Bergson's account of the comic can only be fully appreciated when read in conjunction with his later metaphysical exposition of the élan vital in Creative Evolution and by the account of fabulation that Bergson only elaborates fully three decades later in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. The more substantive account of the élan vital ultimately shows that, in Laughter, Bergson misses his own point: laughter does not simply serve as a means for correcting human behavior but is rather the élan vital's vital summons, the demand of life itself, that human beings challenge their obligations, question their societal forms, and thereby create new and, for Bergson, more ideal forms of life and community.

Cited authors

Bergson Henri