4 h 28 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if a shared laugh is also a quiet way of telling someone to change?
In Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Henri Bergson asks what makes us laugh and why we laugh together. A clown’s tumble, a caricature and a pun become clues. Rather than collect jokes, he looks for a common pattern beneath these familiar pleasures.
His central idea is simple: the comic appears when a living person seems rigid, mechanical or automatic. From a man stumbling in the street to a character trapped by vanity, Bergson follows that pattern through movement, language and theatre. He asks what laughter does for the people who share it.
What you’ll discover
- The need for company Explore Bergson’s conditions for laughter and his claim that the comic belongs to human life.
- When people seem mechanical See how a stumble reveals the clash between living flexibility and rigid, automatic movement.
- A gentle social correction Consider Bergson’s unsettling idea that shared laughter can serve as a quiet punishment for rigidity.
- Words and situations Follow the same comic pattern from bodily gestures and caricatures into puns and stage comedy.
- Characters caught in habits Meet the comic figure whose fixed obsession or vanity makes the surrounding world hard to see.
Who will love it
For readers who love looking closely at everyday things, comedy and theatre, and philosophical ideas about human connection.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Laughter belongs to people and needs company
- The comic is the mechanical on the living
- Laughter is society's gentle correction
- Forms, movements and caricature show the pattern
- Situations and words follow the same law
- Character comedy and the limits of the theory
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Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
by Henri Bergson · 1900
A falling man, a caricature and a pun reveal how laughter brings people together and corrects human habits.
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In short
Laughter is a short book by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. It first appeared in 1900, after three articles he had written on the subject.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Laughter belongs to people and needs company
Bergson starts with three observations about laughter. First, the comic is found only in what is human. We may laugh at an animal or a landscape, but only when it makes us think of a person, such as a hat or a pose. Bergson notes that someone once called man the animal that laughs, and he adds that man is also the animal that is laughed at.
Second, laughter needs a kind of indifference. Bergson says the comic demands a momentary numbing of the heart. If we feel pity or fear for the person in front of us, the scene stops being funny. Laughter has no greater enemy than strong emotion. That is why a fall that would be comic to a distant onlooker is not comic to someone who loves the person who fell. For a moment we must look on with the mind alone.
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What is Bergson's theory of laughter?
Bergson claims that we laugh when something mechanical or rigid appears in a living person who should be flexible. Laughter, he says, is a social gesture that mildly punishes this stiffness and pushes people to stay alert.
What does the mechanical encrusted on the living mean?
It means a habit, routine or fixed pattern that covers a person's natural flexibility, so that he acts like a machine. The man who falls because he did not adjust is the basic example.
When was Laughter by Henri Bergson written?
It appeared in French in 1900 under the title Le Rire, after being published as three articles. An English translation by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell followed in 1911.
The author
Henri Bergson
1859–1941 · French philosopher
Henri Bergson was a French philosopher and Nobel laureate whose ideas about time, intuition, and creativity made him one of the most influential thinkers of his day. Laughter, his celebrated essay on comedy, asks why we laugh and what humor reveals about being human.
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