Comedy: "An Essay on Comedy" by George Meredith. "Laughter" by Henri Bergson

by George Meredith, Henri Bergson, Wylie Sypher (Editor)

Casting a critical eye on comic works throughout the ages, Meredith finds that the most skilled masters of the comic art―Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding, Molière―used comedy to grasp the essence of humanity. Comedy, according to Meredith's theory, serves an important moral and social it redeems us from our posturings, stripping away pride, arrogance, complacency, and other sins. Bergson's essay looks at comedy within a wider field of vision, focusing on laughter and on what makes us laugh. His study examines comic characters and comic acts, comedy in literature and in children's games, comedy as high art and base entertainment, to develop a psychological and philosophical theory of the mainsprings of comedy. Complementing the work of Meredith and Bergson in Wylie Sypher's appendix, as essay that discusses comedy and the underlying comic structure in both anthropological and literaty contexts. Sypher offers an enlightening discussion of the relationship between comedy and tragedy and their link with the ritual purging of evil from a society by means of a scapegoat. He then goes on to examine the guises of the comic hero in such figures as the Wife of Bath, Don Quixote, and Falstaff, relating them to such great tragic figures as Oedipus, Faust, and Hamlet. Through the many perspectives it offers, Comedy will appeal not only to students of literature and literary criticism, but to those studying philosophy and history as well.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Humor, Literary Criticism

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

George Meredith of Britain wrote novels, such as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), and poetic works, including Modern Love (1862).

During the Victorian era, Meredith read law, and people articled him as a solicitor, but shortly after marrying Mary Ellen Nicolls, a 30-year-old widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, in 1849 at 21 years of age, he abandoned that profession for journalism.

He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems, which was published to some acclaim in 1851. His wife left him and their five-year old son in 1858; she died three years later. Her departure was the inspiration for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), his first "major novel." It was considered a breakthrough novel, but its sexual frankness caused a scandal and prevented it from being widely read.

As an advisor to publishers, Meredith is credited with helping Thomas Hardy start his literary career, and was an early associate of J. M. Barrie. Before his death, Meredith was honored from many quarters: he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors; in 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII.

His works include: The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), Farina (1857), Vittoria (1867) and The Egoist (1879). The Egoist is one of his most enduring works.

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

George^Meredith

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't get much out of the Meredith essay. The Bergson was much better but limited. The Sypher one had a much wider scope and overall was rather clear-sighted.

[Drake_ Boling · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There is a logic of the imagination which is not the logic of reason, one which at times is opposed to the latter. It is something like the logic of dreams, though of dreams that have not been left to the whim of individual fancy, being the dreams dreamed by the whole of society. In order to reconstruct this hidden logic, a special kind of effort is needed by which the outer crust of carefully stratified, judgments and firmly established ideas will be lifted. We shall behold the depths of our mind like a sheet of subterranean water, the flow of unbroken streams of images, which pass from one to another. This interpenetration of images does not come about by chance; it obeys laws or rather habits, which hold the same relation to imagination that logic does to thought.”

“Let [us] accept the fundamental law of life, which is the complete negation of repetition!”

What a strange collection! I read this for Bergson’s Laughter but it was far from what I expected. While it was not quite the phenomenological dissection I was hoping for, it offered some very profound reflections on nature of comedy and consuming art in general. Sypher’s preface & appendix were pretty interesting and offered insight on Bergson’s larger arguments. Meredith’s essay was pretty odd and maybe not that deep, or at least I didn't get it, although the lad used some truly insane words. This review will mostly be talking about Bergson’s essay, where through eidetic reduction, he reveals many common threads between the nature of various forms of comedy. Along the way he distills some truly galaxy-brain ruminations on art and reality.

Bergson lays down his phenomenological essentialism :
“We shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition… We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand… For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in its wildest eccentricities”

Bergson likens laughter to a “momentary anaesthesia of the heart”, and recognizes it as a social phenomenon: “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 feign to be prolonged by reverbating from one to another, something beginning with a crash to continue in successive rumblings like thunder in the mountain. However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret Freemasonry or complicity with other laughers–real or imaginary.”

He argues that “the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human”, saying that even when we laugh at non-sentient beings, it is because we are positing our humanity upon them: “You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,--the human caprice whose mould it has assumed.”

“Try for a moment to become interested in everything that is being said and done. Act, in imagination, with those who act and feel with those who feel. In a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance... Step aside. Look upon life as a disinterested spectator. Many a drama will turn into comedy.”

Bergson spends a lot of time talking about laughable elements consisting of a mechanical inelasticity, which, from his other writings on the perception of time, I was expecting a more full explanation of.

My interpretation of what he is trying to say here is as follows. Taking his ideas from Matter and Memory, he's saying that we project images of ourselves forwards through time as we incessantly crawl to through time meet these projections. The present moment being only the shoreline upon which expectation becomes remembrance. Comedy happens when our future orientation is ruptured or disconnected, creating an incongruence in what we perceive to be reality.

If Bergson is espousing an ethic here, it is that it is socially good to be elastic when responding to phenomena of the world, and inherently worthy of being pointed out when one fails to do this, whether the response be laughter, ostracization, or whatever:

Look at this fuckin line:

“In every human form, it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter. A soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation for it is not the Earth that attracts it. The soul imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body. It animates the immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is called gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It draws itself to the ever alert activity of this higher principle and would feign to convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mere automatism…
At this point, if we wish to define the comic by comparing it with its contrary, we should have to contrast it with gracefulness even more than beauty. It partakes rather of the unsprightly than the unsightly of rigidity rather than ugliness.”

The importance of exaggeration for humorous effect cannot be ignored, so Bergson often “exaggerates the problem so to speak by magnifying the effect to the point of making the cause visible…”
This sort of exaggeration is common in many comic forms: “The art of the caricaturist consists in detecting this at times imperceptible tendency and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it beneath the skin department of form, he defines the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter.” I would love to show this guy the offensive caricature dude from Nathan For You.

Later, he speaks further on this grand animism, saying some pretty mind blowing shit in the process:

“But what is the force which divides and subdivides the branches of a tree and a smaller boughs and its roots into radicles? An inexorable law dooms every living energy during the brief interval allotted to it in time to cover the widest possible extent in space. Now, comic fancy is indeed a living energy, a strange plant that is flourished on the stony portions of social soil until such a time as culture should allow it to buy with the most refined products of art”
“We are too apt to speak of our own feelings of pleasure and pain as though full grown at birth, as though each one of them had not a history of its own. Above all, we are too apt to ignore the childish elements latent in most of our joyful emotions. And yet how many of our present pleasures, were we to examine them closely, would shrink to nothing more than memories of past ones? What would be left of our many emotions were we to reduce them to the exact quantum of pure feeling they contain by subtracting from them all that is merely reminiscence? Indeed, it seems possible that after a certain age we become impervious to all fresh or novel forms of joy and the sweetest simple pleasures of the middle-aged man are perhaps nothing more than the revival of the sensations of childhood, a balmy zephyr wafted and fainter and fainter breaths by a past that is ever-receding.”

Insane.

“What is the object of art? Could reality come into direct contact with sense and consciousness? Could we enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves? Probably art would be useless or rather we should all be artists for then our soul would continually vibrate in perfect accord with nature and deepen our souls. We hear the strains of our inner lives unbroken melody a music that is oftentimes gay (lol) but more frequently plaintive and always original. All this is around and within us and yet no wit of it. Do we distinctly perceive between nature and ourselves?...That is dense and opaque for the common herd, thin, almost transparent for their artist and poet. What fairy wove that veil? Was it done in malice or friendliness? We have to live and life demands that we grasp things in their relation to our own needs. Life is action. Life implies the acceptance only of the utilitarian side of things, in order to respond to them by appropriate reaction. All other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred my senses. Consciousness therefore gives me no more than a practical simplification of reality, the vision they furnish me of myself and of things. The differences that are useless to man are obliterated…

Even our own mental states are screened from us in their inmost their personal aspect and the original life they possess when we feel love or hatred when we are gay or sad. Is it really the feeling itself that reaches our consciousness with those innumerable fleeting shades of meaning and deep-presounding echoes that make it something all together our own?”
“For a few moments, at least [the comic] diverts us from the prejudices of form and color that come between ourselves in reality and thus he realizes the loftiest ambition of art, which here consists in revealing to us nature.”

“So, art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us in order to bring us face to face with reality itself. It is from a misunderstanding on this point that the dispute between realism and idealism has arisen. Art is certainly only a more direct version of reality. But this purity of perception lies implies a break with utilitarian convention, an innate and specially localized sense or consciousness. In short, a certain immateriality of life which is what has always been called idealism so that we might say that realism is in the work. When idealism is in the soul and that is only through ideality we can resume contact with reality.”

“If the Earth were a living being as mythology has feigned, most likely, when and repose, it would take the light in dreaming of the sudden explosions whereby it suddenly resumes possession of its innermost nature. Such is the kind of pleasure that is provided for us by drama. Beneath the quiet humdrum life that society has fashioned for us, it stirs something within us.”

words:
casuistries
coxcombry
Ratiocination
cottager
Amphitryton
rubicund
agelasts
unsociable
genera
songfulness
Harpagon
imbedded
captious
larmoyant
apeneck
daemonic
sylvan
controversialist
plethoric
Cornford
coattager
Hypergleasts
Licentiousness
Auxiliary
Pertinacious
caballeros
philologer
Aristophanic
Centenarian
basal
pert
Bacchanalian
Misogelastic
pugilistic
afaimados
treble-Dutch lumbersomeness
Capon
Mandragola
Siebenkäs
Pyrenean
volkslied
Occident
ecclesiastical
sophisms
transvalue
parterre
Labiche
topsyturvydom
vivified
pugnacitu
emanation
tonnage
imbroglio
Quatorze
animalcule
vociferous
Marquises
Sonnetteering
Inter threading
cousinship
perforce
sentimentalist
lout
Bonivard
Daudet
sententious
confoundingness
besotted
roseate
prepossession
unctuousness
travestied
saturnine
perspicacious
dicta
réveurs
billingsgate
Racy Eloquence of the Elevated Fishwife
sagacious
bewails
Fondlewife
Lurewell
peculations
Excogitation
Plyants
Hoyden

Where are the jokes!!!??? You would think there would be all sorts of examples of comedy through history, but all we get are kind of vague recountings of joke formats, explaining why they are funny, or other kinds of tropes used in comedy, especially theater and puppetry(?). I feel like jokes have this sort of ancient commune with the human spirit, that something pulled out of the timeline could be considered funny outside of any historical context, but there was very little discussion of what actually makes us laugh.

Wordplay, which I'm sure was the funniest comic form back then is explained:
“Whereas an illuminating comparison and a striking image always seem to reveal the close harmony that exists between language and nature regarded as two parallel forms of life. The play on words makes us think somehow of a negligence on the part of language, which for the time being seems to have forgotten its real function and now claims to accommodate things to itself instead of accommodating itself to things.”

Later he identified three structures of comic acts… “We shall obtain three processes which might be called repetition inversion and reciprocal interference of series.” His discussion of why these structures are funny would maybe help sitcom writers structure their episodes with built-in payoffs, but maybe not explain why Connor O’malley pointing a gun at a cop from his riding lawnmower makes me laugh.

Overall I feel like this collection could have had more to say about the universal and humanizing expression that is laughter, or the metaphysics of comedy as a whole. But Bergson is always a joy to read and his essay left me with enough big ideas to ponder.

Also may I say the cover of this book on good reads is genuinely terrifying. Mine did not look like that I wouldn’t be caught walking around with that shit.

“Laughter is the indication of an effort which suddenly encounters a void.”

For Bergson, the funniest thing of all time would be a hunchback dressed in his Sunday best reciting a witty pun and then tripping over something, falling down a flight of stairs and then doing The Robot.
For me, the funniest thing of all time would be being in the woods high af and seeing a bunch of squirrels start break dancing.
Maybe we are not so different.

More quotes:

“Let us now attempt to frame a full and methodical theory by seeking as it were at the fountainhead, the shameless changeless and simple archetypes of the manifold and transient practices of the comic stage. Comedy, we said combines events so as to introduce mechanism into the outer forms of life."

“Life cannot be recomposed; it can only be looked at and reproduced. Poetic imagination is a fuller view of reality. If the characters created by a poet give us the impression of life, it is only because they are the poet himself- a multiplication or division of the poet- the poet plumbing the depths of his inner nature and so powerful and effort of inner observation that he lays hold of the potential in the real and takes up what nature has left as a mere outline or sketch in his soul in order to make it a finished work of art all together. Different is the kind of observation from which comedy springs– it is directed outwards.”

“The effect must appear to us as an average effect as expressing an average of mankind like all averages. This one is obtained by bringing together scattered data by comparing analogous cases and extracting their essence in short by a process of abstraction and generalization similar to that which brings the physicist near to the facts with the object of grouping them under laws. It chooses such particularities as admit of being reproduced and consequently are not indissolubly bound up with the individuality of a single person- a possibly common sort of uncommonness. It's so to say- peculiarities that are held in common."

“It is the business of laughter to repress any separatist tendency. Its function is to convert rigidity into plasticity to re-adapt the individual to the hole and short to round off the corners wherever they are met with.”

“For it is a remarkable fact that the more questionable an art, science or occupation is the more those who practice it are inclined to regard themselves as invested with a kind of priesthood and to claim that all should bow before its mysteries.”

“The comic in its extreme form is the logic of the absurd. Every comic effect, it is said, implies contradiction in some of its aspects. What makes us laugh is alleged to be the absurd realized in concrete shape, a palpable absurdity or again an apparent absurdity which we swallow for the moment only to rectify it immediately afterwards. Something absurd from one point of view though capable of a natural explanation from another.”

“The behavior of the intellect in a dream is exactly what we have just been describing: the mind enamored of itself now seeks the outer world. Nothing more than a pretext for realizing its imaginations. A confused murmur of sounds still reaching the ear color enters the field of vision. The senses are not completely shut in.”

“Not infrequently do we notice in dreams a particular crescendo of a weird effect. The first concession extorted from reason introduces a second and this one another of a more serious nature and so on until the crowning absurdity is reached now. This progress towards the absurd produces on the dreamer a very peculiar sensation.”

“Here as elsewhere, nature has utilized evil with a view to good. It is more especially the good that has engaged our attention throughout this work. We've seen that the more society improves, the more plastic is the adaptability it obtains from its members. While the greater tendency towards increasing stability below, the more does it force to the surface, the disturbing elements inseparable from the bulk. Thus, laughter performs a useful function by emphasizing the form of the significant undulations”

He finishes the essay with this absolute unit of a quote:

“Such is also the truthless warfare of the waves on the surface of the sea whilst profound peace reigns in the depths below the billows clash and collide with each other as they strive to find their level. A fringe of Snow White foam feathery and frolicsom follows their changing outlines from time to time. The receding wave leaves behind a remnant of foam on the sandy Beach. The child who plays by picks up a handful and the next moment is astonished to find that nothing remains in his grasp, but a few drops of water water that is far more brackish far more bitter than that of the wave, which brought them in laughter comes into the being in the same self-same fashion. It indicates a slight revolt on the surface of social life. It instantly adopts the changing forms of disturbance. It also is a froth with a saline base like froth. It sparkles; it is gaiety itself.”

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bergson has some interesting points, and it's clear that Freud's joke book borrows heavily from this, but the examples are not funny, and the models for explaining human behavior are clunky. Meredith's essay is boring and racist but at least it has a whiff of feminism. I guess these are tracts to read if you're going to read a lot of more recent scholarly work on comedy and humor, so that when people reference this stuff, you can be like, "oh yeah, I get that," but I suspect, you'd get it anyway, whatever it is, without reading these moldy oldies.