I want to go on a picnic.
Professor Charles Griswold will take all of us out for dinner next Monday! We will go to Chef Chang's on Beacon Street. It's really rare to have professors who treat undergraduates this well. I love him!
Isabella Tianzi Cai
PH258 Philosophy and Literature
April 23, 2009
Question 4: Bergson claims that “mechanical rigidity” is the source of our laughter. Do you think that he is correct? Discuss at least two of his examples and two of your own.
Bergson’s claim that “mechanical rigidity” is the source of our laughter presupposes our intelligence in discerning the regularities in our surroundings. Basically, without the knowledge of what is supposedly going on, we will not discover what is rigid. Bergson associates such kind of knowing with our intellect rather than our emotions. He writes,
In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, thought perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter. (63)
In order to laugh, we must prevent our emotions from taking over our intelligence. Expansive sympathy kills laughter because with it will eliminate the distance between the self and the other, which is critical for our intelligence at work. British writer Angela Carter has once said famously that “comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.” If the dynamics of spectatorial distance in dramatic art are correctly understood here, we shall grant Bergson the premise of his claim.
Secondly, by “mechanical rigidity” that causes laughter, Bergson has in mind all aspects of a human being but puts his emphasis on the physical. With respect to our body, he discusses its forms, its gestures, and its movements; with respect to our mind, he only focuses on our psychology. According to him, the comic element in a human face does not come from its “ugliness” but its “rigidness” (79). Caricature elicits laughter from us because we see in it someone’s “whole life . . . crystallised into [a] particular cast of features” (76). A typical example would be the caricature of Marilyn Monroe; most pieces exaggerate her fake full lips and artificial eyebrows in order to make us laugh at her heavily “made-up” face. Yet, which female film star can afford to appear in the public without make-up?
The “mechanical rigidity” of our gestures and movements are easy to picture. Bergson gives the example of a speech maker. That person’s repeated gesticulation will leave an impression on his audience, who will then laugh when they correctly predict his movements (80). Bergson’s logic is as such,
The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at work behind the living . . . This deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of laughter. (82)
I do not agree with Bergson on this point because people repeat themselves indeed. Furthermore, repetition in drama can be both tragic and comic. In Antoine de Saint Expúry’s The Little Prince, the businessman, the lamplighter, and the geographer keep doing what they are doing. They are reduced to their functions, but they do not make the little prince laugh at all. As a reader, I also did not laugh when I pictured them in my mind.
Bergson adds “an automatic regulation of society” as the cause of our laughter (90). His example is the custom-house officers who asked a bizarre question out of context. I would like to expand the definition a little by coining a new phrase—“an automatic regulation of a culture or a place.” One time my father was reading the newspaper while my mother was watching the television. My father came across some news of Bill Clinton’s daughter Chelsea and read it out loud. My mother, clearly absentminded at that moment, asked, “How come her last name is not Ke?” (Clinton is translated into Ke Lin Dun in Chinese while Chelsea is translated into Qie Er Xi.) Her question is funny, but it is because she had been thinking in Chinese.
Work Cited
Bergson, Henri. “Laughter.” Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkin University Press, 1980. 61-192.
