Laughter, Henri Bergson [good novels to read txt] 📗

which is turned against him. You

may remember the dialogue between a mother and her son in the Faux

Bonshommes: “My dear boy, gambling on ‘Change is very risky. You win

one day and lose the next.”—“Well, then, I will gamble only every

other day.” In the same play too we find the following edifying

conversation between two company-promoters: “Is this a very

honourable thing we are doing? These unfortunate shareholders, you

see, we are taking the money out of their very pockets….”—“Well,

out of what do you expect us to take it?”

 

An amusing result is likewise obtainable whenever a symbol or an

emblem is expanded on its concrete side, and a pretence is made of

retaining the same symbolical value for this expansion as for the

emblem itself. In a very lively comedy we are introduced to a Monte

Carlo official, whose uniform is covered with medals, although he

has only received a single decoration. “You see, I staked my medal

on a number at roulette,” he said, “and as the number turned up, I

was entitled to thirty-six times my stake.” This reasoning is very

similar to that offered by Giboyer in the Effrontes. Criticism is

made of a bride of forty summers who is wearing orange-blossoms with

her wedding costume: “Why, she was entitled to oranges, let alone

orange-blossoms!” remarked Giboyer.

 

But we should never cease were we to take one by one all the laws we

have stated, and try to prove them on what we have called the plane

of language. We had better confine ourselves to the three general

propositions of the preceding section. We have shown that “series of

events” may become comic either by repetition, by inversion, or by

reciprocal interference. Now we shall see that this is also the case

with series of words.

 

To take series of events and repeat them in another key or another

environment, or to invert them whilst still leaving them a certain

meaning, or mix them up so that their respective meanings jostle one

another, is invariably comic, as we have already said, for it is

getting life to submit to be treated as a machine. But thought, too,

is a living thing. And language, the translation of thought, should

be just as living. We may thus surmise that a phrase is likely to

become comic if, though reversed, it still makes sense, or if it

expresses equally well two quite independent sets of ideas, or,

finally, if it has been obtained by transposing an idea into some

key other than its own. Such, indeed, are the three fundamental laws

of what might be called THE COMIC TRANSFORMATION OF SENTENCES, as we

shall show by a few examples.

 

Let it first be said that these three laws are far from being of

equal importance as regards the theory of the ludicrous. INVERSION

is the least interesting of the three. It must be easy of

application, however, for it is noticeable that, no sooner do

professional wits hear a sentence spoken than they experiment to see

if a meaning cannot be obtained by reversing it,—by putting, for

instance, the subject in place of the object, and the object in

place of the subject. It is not unusual for this device to be

employed for refuting an idea in more or less humorous terms. One of

the characters in a comedy of Labiche shouts out to his neighbour on

the floor above, who is in the habit of dirtying his balcony, “What

do you mean by emptying your pipe on to my terrace?” The neighbour

retorts, “What do you mean by putting your terrace under my pipe?”

There is no necessity to dwell upon this kind of wit, instances of

which could easily be multiplied. The RECIPROCAL INTERFERENCE of two

sets of ideas in the same sentence is an inexhaustible source of

amusing varieties. There are many ways of bringing about this

interference, I mean of bracketing in the same expression two

independent meanings that apparently tally. The least reputable of

these ways is the pun. In the pun, the same sentence appears to

offer two independent meanings, but it is only an appearance; in

reality there are two different sentences made up of different

words, but claiming to be one and the same because both have the

same sound. We pass from the pun, by imperceptible stages, to the

true play upon words. Here there is really one and the same sentence

through which two different sets of ideas are expressed, and we are

confronted with only one series of words; but advantage is taken of

the different meanings a word may have, especially when used

figuratively instead of literally. So that in fact there is often

only a slight difference between the play upon words on the one

hand, and a poetic metaphor or an illuminating comparison on the

other. 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 upon

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. And so the play upon words always

betrays a momentary LAPSE OF ATTENTION in language, and it is

precisely on that account that it is amusing.

 

INVERSION and RECIPROCAL INTERFERENCE, after all, are only a certain

playfulness of the mind which ends at playing upon words. The comic

in TRANSPOSITION is much more far-reaching. Indeed, transposition is

to ordinary language what repetition is to comedy.

 

We said that repetition is the favourite method of classic comedy.

It consists in so arranging events that a scene is reproduced either

between the same characters under fresh circumstances or between

fresh characters under the same circumstances. Thus we have,

repeated by lackeys in less dignified language, a scene already

played by their masters. Now, imagine ideas expressed in suitable

style and thus placed in the setting of their natural environment.

If you think of some arrangement whereby they are transferred to

fresh surroundings, while maintaining their mutual relations, or, in

other words, if you can induce them to express themselves in an

altogether different style and to transpose themselves into another

key, you will have language itself playing a comedy—language itself

made comic. There will be no need, moreover, actually to set before

us both expressions of the same ideas, the transposed expression and

the natural one. For we are acquainted with the natural one—the one

which we should have chosen instinctively. So it will be enough if

the effort of comic invention bears on the other, and on the other

alone. No sooner is the second set before us than we spontaneously

supply the first. Hence the following general rule: A COMIC EFFECT

IS ALWAYS OBTAINABLE BY TRANSPOSING THE NATURE EXPRESSION OF AN IDEA

INTO ANOTHER KEY.

 

The means of transposition are so many and varied, language affords

so rich a continuity of themes and the comic is here capable of

passing through so great a number of stages, from the most insipid

buffoonery up to the loftiest forms of humour and irony, that we

shall forego the attempt to make out a complete list. Having stated

the rule, we will simply, here and there, verify its main

applications.

 

In the first place, we may distinguish two keys at the extreme ends

of the scale, the solemn and the familiar. The most obvious effects

are obtained by merely transposing the one into the other, which

thus provides us with two opposite currents of comic fancy.

 

Transpose the solemn into the familiar and the result is parody. The

effect of parody, thus defined, extends to instances in which the

idea expressed in familiar terms is one that, if only in deference

to custom, ought to be pitched in another key. Take as an example

the following description of the dawn, quoted by Jean Paul Richter:

“The sky was beginning to change from black to red, like a lobster

being boiled.” Note that the expression of old-world matters in

terms of modern life produces the same effect, by reason of the halo

of poetry which surrounds classical antiquity.

 

It is doubtless the comic in parody that has suggested to some

philosophers, and in particular to Alexander Bain, the idea of

defining the comic, in general, as a species of DEGRADATION. They

describe the laughable as causing something to appear mean that was

formerly dignified. But if our analysis is correct, degradation is

only one form of transposition, and transposition itself only one of

the means of obtaining laughter. There is a host of others, and the

source of laughter must be sought for much further back. Moreover,

without going so far, we see that while the transposition from

solemn to trivial, from better to worse, is comic, the inverse

transposition may be even more so.

 

It is met with as often as the other, and, apparently, we may

distinguish two main forms of it, according as it refers to the

PHYSICAL DIMENSIONS of an object or to its MORAL VALUE.

 

To speak of small things as though they were large is, in a general

way, TO EXAGGERATE. Exaggeration is always comic when prolonged, and

especially when systematic; then, indeed, it appears as one method

of transposition. It excites so much laughter that some writers have

been led to define the comic as exaggeration, just as others have

defined it as degradation. As a matter of fact, exaggeration, like

degradation, is only one form of one kind of the comic. Still, it is

a very striking form. It has given birth to the mock-heroic poem, a

rather old-fashioned device, I admit, though traces of it are still

to be found in persons inclined to exaggerate methodically. It might

often be said of braggadocio that it is its mock-heroic aspect which

makes us laugh.

 

Far more artificial, but also far more refined, is the transposition

upwards from below when applied to the moral value of things, not to

their physical dimensions. To express in reputable language some

disreputable idea, to take some scandalous situation, some low-class

calling or disgraceful behaviour, and describe them in terms of the

utmost “RESPECTABILITY,” is generally comic. The English word is

here purposely employed, as the practice itself is

characteristically English. Many instances of it may be found in

Dickens and Thackeray, and in English literature generally. Let us

remark, in passing, that the intensity of the effect does not here

depend on its length. A word is sometimes sufficient, provided it

gives us a glimpse of an entire system of transposition accepted in

certain social circles and reveals, as it were, a moral organisation

of immorality. Take the following remark made by an official to one

of his subordinates in a novel of Gogol’s, “Your peculations are too

extensive for an official of your rank.”

 

Summing up the foregoing, then, there are two extreme terms of

comparison, the very large and the very small, the best and the

worst, between which transposition may be effected in one direction

or the other. Now, if the interval be gradually narrowed, the

contrast between the terms obtained will be less and less violent,

and the varieties of comic transposition more and more subtle.

 

The most common of these contrasts is perhaps that between the real

and the ideal, between what is and what ought to be. Here again

transposition may take place in either direction. Sometimes we state

what ought to be done, and pretend to believe that this is just what

is actually being done; then we have IRONY. Sometimes, on the

contrary, we describe with scrupulous minuteness what is being done,

and pretend to believe that this is just what