Humor is like a twin sibling that grows up with you. It is always there by your side however, it too changes and matures; whereupon things and ideas that you once considered humorous may now take on a less than funny state. For what makes you laugh now is quite different from what made you laugh as a child. Take the comic section of the newspaper…it is a curious thing…when you were young the drawings lured you into their story cells, but once inside the cartoon bubbles were not very funny…even to an extent that they really made little sense; creating a disappointing sham to your six year old mind. (After-all… your concept of satire and irony was just forming.) And it was not until you grew older that the humor contained within each comic strip made you laugh.
As ideas and values have transformed with time, from one decade to another, what amuses us to the point of laughter has gone in and out of vogue. Which moves us along to another phenomena; laughter is a uniquely human quality. Yes, I too have sensed that an opened mouth pet looks like they are laughing, and yes, the dog’s tail wags wildly when you talk in a “silly and endearing voice,” as if they found you to be rather amusing. However, no matter how much teeth and gum they show, I would have to say we humans hold the lease on laughter.
Today’s blog brings back our esteemed thinker: Henri Bergson. Like many before him the idea of humor and laughter was “no laughing matter” for there was and likely still is wonderment about it. Mr. Bergson found a “common ground” regarding humor, the comic, and laughter in his essay titled Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. And so, let us take a pass through the early 1900s and contemplate a snippet extracted from his words.
“…the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple. This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other intelligences… Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one.
Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. It may, perchance, have happened to you, when seated in a railway carriage or at table d’hote, to hear travelers relating to one another stories which must have been comic to them, for they laughed heartily… However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary. How often has it been said that the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience!
On the other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comic effects are incapable of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social group! It is through not understanding the importance of this double fact that the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity in which the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange, isolated phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human activity…
To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification…”
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