Some notes on Bergson on laughter

I have attached the script for my latest video on Bergson and comedy. You can also find it on our Google Drive, where I have also uploaded a PDF of Bergson's book:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rasWDAFyI4t1EOSePbeLc0LbMKf10rHN?usp=drive_link

Some complementary notes:

Recommended introductions:

• For a good introductory lecture to Bergson, I recommend Michael Sugrue's. He talks a little bit about his book on laughter towards the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-JN_vf9EFo

• You can also find an audio book excerpt on Bergson from Will Durant's Story of Philosophy for a wider introduction:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHoxEcbOzug

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article on Bergson:
  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/

-

There are a lot of interesting points made by Bergson that I don't mention in the video, so I will note some of them here:

Bergson makes a distinction between comic utterances and witty ones.
Comic utterances make us laugh at the person uttering them.
Witty ones make as laugh at ourselves or a third person.

Bergson at one point devises a trio of comic effects which he derives as opposites of the characteristics of life, these are:
1. Repetition
2. Inversion
3. Reciprocal Interference of Series

I spoke about the first one, repetition, but not about the other two:
Inversion - Bergson gives the example of a child teaching their parents, instead of the other way around.
Reciprocal Interference of Series - I found it difficult to find an example of this, but this concerns comic phenomena in which two unrelated series of events unwittingly clash. Bergson finds this type of comedy primarily in comic plays. The specific law he devises for it is this: "A situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time."

Bergson also believes that the toys we enjoy in childhood has an effect on comedy. He gives the example of a jack-in-a-box, which leads to a kind of repetitive comedy which consists in "a repressed feeling which goes off like a spring, and an idea that delights in repressing the feeling anew."

Towards the end of the book, Bergson also speaks about comedy which works by following dream logic: when functioning properly, our ideas should conform to reality, but dream logic consists in cases where reality conforms to our ideas. Made me think of old cartoons in which the laws of reality themselves are played with (e.g., a cartoon animal running off a cliff but not falling down because they are not yet conscious of the fact)

The book also has a beautiful analysis of art in general, the ultimate point of which, for Bergson, is the revelation of nature. The various forms of art break through the barriers and limitations that are placed between us and life for the sake of pragmatic purposes in our daily affairs, and reveal to us nature as it is. Even our own states of mind are often shrouded to ourselves, as we are typically only conscious of those parts of it that are needed for our practical affairs. Art reveals them too. Comedy is thus unique among all other arts in that it concerns the superficial, rather than burrowing the depths to reveal things as they are.

There's even more to the book, so I highly recommend anyone who finds this interesting to read the whole thing. It's not that long!

-

Many of my viewers will probably be interested in Bergson for his influence on Deleuze. For Deleuze, however, the most important parts of Bergson are his concept of duration (first introduced in the essay Time and Free Will), and the concepts set out in his book Matter and Memory. I find Bergson's discussions of time and memory fascinating too, so I would like to make videos on that in the future, but I'm not well-read enough to speak about them yet!

Hopefully someone found this post helpful. Thanks for the support, everyone!