Why Do We Laugh?

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVII, Issue 15, 10 April 1912, Page 70

Why Do We Laugh?

BE r 3SON EXPLAINS THE REASON. Nowadays Bergonisin is a fashionable Cult. The works of the famous French philosopher are being widely read, as much for the reason that they were written by Bergson as for what they contain. A\’hen Bergson lectured in London a month or two ago, no hall could he found Targe enough to hold all those anxious to hear him. and his books are being translated into practically every language of Europe and widely circulated in every country. To one who makes his first acquaintance with the Bergonism philiBophy through the recently-published essay on ‘•Laughter,” there seemed to be no particular reason for this sudden enthusiasm. Henri Bergson is certainly a lucid and attractive writer, enjoying at times wonderfully ilhistrative metaphors, and his ideas are original; hut they are not strikingly so. and his philosophy does not always ring quite true. PSYCHOLOGY OF THE RIDICULOUS Was it not Rochefocatild who said that in the misfortune of even our best friends there is always something at which we must laugh? At any rate, it was a Trenchman who endeavours to explain to us the reason for our seeming hard hearted n ess. Bergson finds in everything ve laugh at a common element—in a practical joke, in a ludicrous accident, in a queer-look ifl « animal, in a picture, in a comic situation. That common element.* he says, is humanity. The comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. — For —instance.’* we" can never laugh at a landscape. Be it “beautiful. charming, and sublime, or insignificant ami ugly, it will never be laughable.”

If.there is anything in a landscape to provoke a smile—such as the Nelson railway station. for instance—if is not at the building itself that we laugh, but at the person who designed it. We laugh at monkeys, because we see in them a grotesque resemblance to man. The element essential to laughter must he some departure from the worm of humanity. When a poni|»oits old gentleman sits on bis top hat we smile in exactly the same way as when we hear a clever pun. In one case it is the violent departure from the victim’s usual mode of procedure which excites our risible faculties; in the other wr are reminded —albeit deliberately—of the stupidity of the man who cannot use his own language properly. In b»th cases there is the essential conspicuous difference from the worm.

EMOTION THE ENEMY OF

LAUGHTER.A symptom which Bergson points out as especially worthy of notice is the "absence of feeling" which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it felt, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled.. Indifference is its natural' environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court, and impose silence upon our pity. Everyone of us who has phiyed a game of football can remember laughing heartily at the spectacle of a friend nursing’a painfully hacked shin. Of course, he asked what we found to laugh at, and we could not tell him. Bergson tells us that our sense of humour for the moment was stronger than our sympathy. -In such a case no great harm is done, but when we cannot restrain our laughter at a really pitiable case—there are people, for instance, who will make fun of a cripple l —then laughter becomes cruel, and the person who laughs shows a want of self-control which is cffl’pable. THE VALUE OF LAUGHTER. One critic of the Bergsonian theory lias summed up his philosophy in the following words: "Laughter is a means of social chastisement; it is the corrective which society applies to something inimical to social life.” A little ridicule is good for most people, and wilt often cure a bad habit more surely and more quickly than any amount of preaching. The ultra-dignified person who proceeds through the street with a handbell attached to the tail of his highly respectable morning coat learns a far better lesson from the laughter of the groundlings than he would from their censure.