Laughter is vital

Summary–The article ⊕ The article is originally published in Aeon by Emily Herring talks about the necessary conditions of comedy (implied to laughter) as per Henri Bergson’s leitmotiv of humor. It begins with Henri’s three conditions essential for laughter to emerge: humans only laugh at human-like attributes, emotions are foe of laughter, and laughter needs a social echo. The article then takes a steep jump in time where Bergson’s discovery of letimotiv of laughter is described. Laughter is seen as a social mechanism to keep the organisms of it healthy. Hence, laughter is always aimed at rigidity and whatever is laughed at is metaphorically treated like a disease to the society.

Analysis can be viewed here_

In the 1970 sketch of Monty Python, Cleese the TV host asks an ill-tempered, rowdy lady a weird and challenging question. The dialogue as follows:

The pythons were well versed in the Western philosophy. They were probably aware about the essay by Henri Bergson called Laughter.

Before Bergson, only few philosophers worked on the laughter. Democritus, being the most earlierst of the philosophers, was known as the laughing philosopher. He is well known for his work on atomism, but little is the importance of his work on laughter. Aristotle’s work is also banished or has not trickled down to us. Some other thinkers who have written on the subject are Hobbes and Descartes who stated that the cause of laughter is superiority experienced by the laugher over the laughed. Kant and Schoppenhaur identified the origin of the laughter as incongruity. Spencer and Freud talked about the effects of the laughter in providing relief from a tension. However, Bergson was unconvinced with the explanation and set out to start his own work on laughter and the art of comedy. He believed that laughter and comedy deserves a higher place in the literature than it is given. Although his work includes incongruity and superiority, his theory opens up new perspectives to look at humor.

The Monty python sketch plays a meta comedy as pythons were aware about the Bergson’s work–the old lady in picking a random name plays out the incongruity really well. When Bergson published his essay on Laughter, he secured an important place among the thinkers of world. But why did Bergson leave aside philosophical relevant topics like truth, evolution, time, and mind-body problem and set his heart to a rather trivial and frowned upon topic of laughter? What was to be gained from this study? The topic is a ticklish one. The topic of laughter has fooled many philosophers to their speculations. The topic has so much unnatural subjectivity that it did not make sense to study it philosophically. This is pertinent to anyone who had to explain their jokes. As Katherine White and E B white puts in 1941:

Bergson did not wish to pursue the method of analysis by dissection. Instead he wanted to pursue the analysis like a zoologist studying frog. A zoologist studies frog in terms of its condition where the frog grows, survives, and thrives. He belived that laughter should be studied as a living thing:

Bergson starts like a zoologist who studies conditions where the metaphorical frog is studied in its natural habitat. In other words he studies the conditions in which laughter is most likely to appear and to thrive. Berguson derived thusly has three observations which are necessary for laughter.

The first one is so simple, that Bergson was surprised to see how it was unobserved for this long. Laughter needs humanness or human like features. Bergson had not foreseen that this condition of laughter will be best fulfilled and represented by internet memes of our pet friends. But he anticipated this, as he wrote about laughter directed at non-humans:

Consider for example, Grumpy cat (now deceased). The grim on her face is very human like. Her comedy is based on the fact that she has human life features. Similarly for inanimate objects that make us laugh. An American vaudeville performer Will Rogers once said, ‘An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.’ But, in the age of internet, there are vegetables with human like features which are pretty to safe laugh even in the offices. Hence, according to Bergson, it is possible to laugh at any object but only with a condition that we find human like features in them:

The second observation by Bergson is counter-intuitive–emotions are enemies of laughter. His point was that emotions like pity, anger, melancholy make it difficulty for laughter to exist.We know by intuition when to laugh and when not to laugh. When emotions are used where laughter is thriving, the person is usually outcasted who ignore these unspoken rules. This is best displayed by Gottfried, the American comedian joking about 9/11 few days after the incident. Most of the US talk shows stopped their shows, but Gottfried provided a classic case of a joke being ‘too soon’:

The comedian reported that no body had lost an audience like he had. Whereever there are emotional stakes against the laughter, emotional stakes win. For laughter to occur, there must me a disinterested spectator.

But one can laugh in their harships as well. Socially, laughter can be a coping mechanism in terms of hardships. George Harrison of the Beatles, while on his death bed, told his newly hired assistant, “How are you liking your new job?". Similarly Voltaire on his death bed, told the priest exhorting Satan from him, said: ‘There is no time to make new enemies’. Bergson’s second condition of the detached perspectives are in play in such conditions.

Finally laughter needs a social echo. Evolutionary theorists propose an adaptive value to laughter in a group. The laughter provides a signal of safety in social groups. Laughter and humor turns out an important factor in our social group. Many countries have jokes about the neighboring country resulting the bonding of a fellow nation. Belgians joke about their neighboring country as, God wanted to create beauty and he created France. But then God thought that people will be jealous. So he created the French

Jokes need not be nationalistic to be humorous, several football teams also have a bonding on the basis of jokes on the rival teams. Similarly, condescension is also not necessary for social bonding. There are many inside jokes shared among friends that indicate the social bonding. Several team based jokes, political jokes are based on specialist knowledge, ‘Our laughter is always the laughter of a group’ Bergson said. Even when we are laughing alone, we have an audience in mind.

Bergson’s ideas vividly describe and exemplify about the conditions of laughter and where does it thrive, however it does not provide the reasons for laughter. The observation does provide important clues. We laugh at human like objects and beings, and is communal. In addition, laughter needs a temporary detachment from emotions, laughter is punitive. But why is laughter punitive? To understand the why, let us take a detour and examine Bergson’s philosophy of life.

After publishing Laughter, Bergson focused on biological evolutions. He mentions in his bestseller book Creative evolution that life is ever changing and spontaneous movement. In this sense, life is not repetitive, rigid and predictable, it is not mechanistic in nature. The time, life, and matter are intertwined. Life uses evolution to break free from the three mechanistic properties. However, in most cases, efforts turns short and laughter emerges />. ⊕ >/ One tends to become mechanistic (not sure why), but life essentially is organic History has a shown us that organisms who fall short of adapting flexibly have gone extinct. Organims need elasticity to over obstacles.

It seems that Bergson had already these questions on mind while writing Laughter. He saw laughter as a solution to a particular human problem. As human life progressed, it was also concerned with the vital processes along with material (materialistic) processes. ‘Social life’ as Bergson puts it ‘needs a delicate adjustment of will’ and ‘constant reciprocal adaptation’ between members of the group. So members of the society constantly need to be elastic.