Three Insights on Laughter From a 100-Year-Old Book
And a Few Thoughts on Ricky Gervais's New Special (Comedy Resources #5)
I recently found an oddly structured little book, the whole of which was two essays on the nature of comedy. One essay was written by the novelist, George Meredith, and the other was by philosopher Henri Bergson. Essays? On comedy? Yeah, essays on comedy. Like most, I opened the book expecting a dry, dusty academic read that felt more like an artifact than a living text. But like a good joke, my expectations could not have been more wrong. These two essays were filled with sharp, counter-intuitive, and deeply relevant ideas about the mechanics of humor and the purpose of laughter.
This is the kinda nerdy stuff all comedians should dig into. This is also the kinda stuff the scholar-researcher in me loves. These century-old thoughts gave me some new angles to look at comedy from and reminded me that it’s all far more complex and also far more vital than most of us would ever consider. It goes way beyond the whole setup-punch template.
The first idea that struck me came from Henri Bergson, who argued that laughter is not an expression of warmth or affection. The keyword there is not. Again: laughter is not an expression of warmth or affection. Instead, he argues that it’s a cold intellectual tool used for social purposes. Huh?! You read that right; keep reading! Bergson contends that true laughter requires a “momentary anesthesia of the heart.” Now, this kinda goes against everything many of us think we know about laughter. It requires a momentary stopping of the heart, a momentary “putting the heart under,” if you will?! That sounds crazy. But here’s his reasoning: “Laughter is incompatible with emotion.” Put simply: we cannot laugh at something if we feel genuine pity or sympathy for it.
I actually know this to be true from experience. I had a few jokes in the past where I’d get nothing but “awww” after I told them. Not laughs, awwwws. For a long time, I had to keep going back to the drawing board to figure out how to move audiences from pity or sympathy to laughter. That often looks like completely reframing the joke and moving words around, deleting words, adding words, etc. On a couple of those jokes, after doing those things, they hit. I moved the audience from sympathy/pity to laughter. Bergson’s theory here was proven right.
Also, and this was a huge light-bulb moment for me, according to Bergson, laughter is primarily a social gesture employed by a group to correct an individual. Wow! When someone acts with excessive rigidity or eccentricity or whatever, the group’s laughter serves to humiliate them back into conformity. That blows my mind! When a comedian says something, whether it’s true or wild or both, laughter becomes the practical means an audience uses to both enforce social flexibility and punish those who behave like unthinking automatons. Laughter’s function, then, is not sympathetic but profoundly utilitarian and corrective. Laughs send the message, “That’s wrong. We all know it’s wrong. You shouldn’t say/do that. Stop it. Correct it. Move on.” I think I agree, but I’m still brooding on this.
The second major concept, also from Bergson, identifies the core of the comedian as “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” Lol. Admittedly, that sounds so lame. But this is his sorta old-school way of saying that we laugh when we see a living person acting like a mindless machine. Again, wow! When a comedian’s telling a story and they purposefully misunderstand some word or social cue, for instance, and they share that, they reveal that they’ve lost nuance, especially the ability to engage in social nuance. When the audience hears this, the laugh arises from the contrast between the expected adaptability (i.e. “the expectation”) and the rigid, automatic behavior of a mechanism (i.e. “the reality”). This idea, this “gap,” as I’ve written about many times before, explains a wide range of comedic situations, if not all of them. I’m on board with this.
Bergson uses a simple example of a man running in the street who stumbles and falls. The laughter from passersby is not aimed at his pain but at his “mechanical inelasticity.” Again…lame wording. But the point stands: for a moment, the man’s body was running on autopilot and a glitch in his human programming made him continue a motion no longer appropriate for the situation. (Translation: the expectation was that he should’ve easily walked across the street with no problems, but the reality is he fell. What people are laughing at is the gap between expectation and reality.) We laugh at funny characters in shows and stories for the same reason, because they are like puppets stuck in their habits, completely unaware of themselves. We laugh because we see their blind spots but they don’t. Or, as Bergson puts it, “The comic person is unconscious.”
Where Bergson’s theory of laughter is cold and corrective, George Meredith’s essay is different; it offers a far more optimistic view of things. His idea of comedy does not demand an anesthesia of the heart; rather, his view is warmer, it’s pathos-driven. He presents laughter as a high-minded and civilizing force. He calls this force the “Comic Spirit,” and argues that it’s a delicate art. It can only flourish under specific social conditions or constraints. When a society can laugh, it’s a sign it has reached a high level of intellectual refinement.
I just watched the new Ricky Gervais special last night, “Mortality,” and near the end, he makes this same point. He tells the audience it’s good to hear them laughing at taboo things again because, for the last 15 years, comedians have been pushing back, leading the charge for free speech. And he signals that the audience laughing at his jokes means that the comedians, and society by way of siding with the comedians, have won. It was a nice way of making the audience feel smart and intellectually refined. Gervais is signaling to them that unlike the “thought police” and “virtue signalers” and “hate crime advocates,” the audience is actually intellectually superior because they possess the ability to pick up on nuance. They’re both smart enough to get the jokes and get that they are just that - jokes.
Meredith argues that great comedy requires “a society of cultivated men and women... wherein ideas are current, and the perceptions quick.” The goal of this type of higher laughter, he says, is correction through self awareness. This is not all that different than Bergson’s claim that, when an audience laughs, they’re correcting the comedian and, in a sense, one another. Meredith says, “You may estimate your capacity for comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you love without loving them less.” Translation: You know you’re intellectually sophisticated when you can crack jokes about people you love and love them just the same. It’s like what I often tell those closest to me, “One of the ways you know I like/love you is if I joke with you.”
These ideas from Bergson and Meredith have given me some new lenses to look at comedy. They’ve helped me see how the most effective and self-deprecating stand-up embodies Meredith’s civilizing and correcting spirit. When a comedian invites an audience to recognize their shared vanities by first detecting the ridicule in themselves or their life situations, this is exactly what’s going on. As I said above, this goes well with Bergson’s point, too, about comedy being a type of social corrective. When the viral spread of a meme mocks a public figure’s awkward or rigid behavior, for instance, it’s nudging them back toward a shared norm.
Comedy, humor, jokes, and so on are complex social mechanisms. They issue challenges, sometimes major challenges, but at the same time, call for conformity. Most comedians probably won’t like to hear that. But it seems true enough. And the human response to the absurdity of rigidity in a fluid world is a powerful indicator of a society’s intellectual health. Comedians like Gervais and others know this. That’s why they’ve spent 15 years pushing back so hard against those attempting to sully and impinge on free speech. At the end of the day, it’s really quite remarkable to find that these century-old essays offer insightful and useful frameworks for understanding comedy so deeply. They have armed me not just with more theory about comedy, but also the thrilling sense that I’ve now been let in on a deep secret, a secret about the very structure of our social lives.
JOKE WRITING COURSE: By the way, if you have any interest at all in learning about your persona, how to write some jokes, or doing stand-up comedy, check out my online joke writing course, “The Joke Writer’s Lab,” HERE.