Laughter | Page 4

Professor Bergson, has been revised in detail by the
author himself, and the present translation is the only authorised one.
For this ungrudging labour of revision, for the thoroughness with which
it has been carried out, and for personal sympathy in many a difficulty
of word and phrase, we desire to offer our grateful acknowledgment to
Professor Bergson. It may be pointed out that the essay on Laughter
originally appeared in a series of three articles in one of the leading
magazines in France, the Revue de Paris. This will account for the
relatively simple form of the work and the comparative absence of
technical terms. It will also explain why the author has confined
himself to exposing and illustrating his novel theory of the comic
without entering into a detailed discussion of other explanations
already in the field. He none the less indicates, when discussing sundry

examples, why the principal theories, to which they have given rise,
appear to him inadequate. To quote only a few, one may mention those
based on contrast, exaggeration, and degradation.
The book has been highly successful in France, where it is in its
seventh edition. It has been translated into Russian, Polish, and
Swedish. German and Hungarian translations are under preparation. Its
success is due partly to the novelty of the explanation offered of the
comic, and partly also to the fact that the author incidentally discusses
questions of still greater interest and importance. Thus, one of the best
known and most frequently quoted passages of the book is that portion
of the last chapter in which the author outlines a general theory of art.
C. B. F. R.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
THE COMIC IN GENERAL--THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS
AND MOVEMENTS-- EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC

CHAPTER II
THE COMIC ELEMENT IN SITUATIONS AND THE COMIC
ELEMENT IN WORDS

CHAPTER III
THE COMIC IN CHARACTER

CHAPTER I
THE COMIC IN GENERAL--THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS
AND MOVEMENTS-- EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC.

What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable?
What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-
andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a
scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us
invariably the same essence from which so many different products
borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The
greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little
problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away
and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic
speculation. Our excuse for attacking the problem in our turn must lie
in the fact that we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a
definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing. However trivial it
may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine
ourselves to watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible
gradations from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the
strangest metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen.
Maybe we may gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that,
something more flexible than an abstract definition,--a practical,
intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship.
And maybe we may also find that, unintentionally, we have made an
acquaintance that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of its own,
even in its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness. It
dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are at
once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group. Can it
then fail to throw light for us on the way that human imagination works,
and more particularly social, collective, and popular imagination?
Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not also have something
of its own to tell us about art and life?

At the outset we shall put forward three observations which we look
upon as fundamental. They have less bearing on the actually comic
than on the field within which it must be sought.
I
The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic
does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A landscape
may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it
will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because
you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may
laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the
piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,--the human
caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange