By Janet Marugg | FāVS News
When the world seems drunk with despair and any moment is the one that can ruin a whole life I admittedly flee to comedy for both the relief and the cure. Laughter is a grossly under-prescribed fixer of things – both an anesthetic escape and a delivered cure. I’m reminded of the work of French philosopher, Henri Bergson, who studied humor and enjoyed popularity in his time unworthy of today’s obscurity.
Henri Bergson and Laughter
Bergson is credited for causing the first U.S. Times Square traffic jam as people crowded to hear him speak. Bergson won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature, whirled through academic life in France and the UK and was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And he wrote an interesting piece: Laughter, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, exploring how humor serves to improve our lives.
In his day, Bergson knew humor like Charlie Chaplin’s full-length film, “Modern Times,” where an assembly line worker uses a wrench for so long while working that he can’t stop turning things with it while not working to the point of trying to use the wrench on a woman’s face. Absurd repetition makes humans laugh.
And Freddie Frinton’s comedy sketch “Table for One” that has the butler repeatedly tripping on the tiger’s head rug in the room. The butler’s absentmindedness, his inability to adapt to his environment, is hilarious.
French philosophers aren’t for everyone, but I find myself agreeable to Bergson’s idea that ridiculous ideas deserve ridicule. Bergson and I both consider life as change and development and that comedy happens “when life forgets itself” and stiffens to repetitive rigidity. Like Chaplin and his wrench. Bergson and I say that life is being conscious and aware and that absentmindedness like Finton’s butler is comedic gold.
To Bergson, life exhibits gracefulness and our laughter at someone’s inability to stretch and adapt can help them out of mechanistic clumsiness and stagnant thinking so that they are a better contributor to humanity. Bergson, a Darwinist, cites the ability to adapt as an important evolutionary skill for human survival and that laughing at absentmindedness and biased rigidity benefits society by bringing just enough embarrassment to the offender to bring them into linen and better our species.
To Bergson and me, bullies, authoritarians and rigid totalitarians demonstrate the inability to adapt and are targets for laughter. Authoritarians, with their ignorance, stubbornness, vanity, biases, irrationality, etc. stagnate humanity’s potential and therefore are targets for humor.
The religion of my birth is an authoritarian regime that worships an authoritarian god. Predictable and rigid, it is rich for satire from standup to Broadway. I get it now, but as a believer I was absentminded and mechanical in my defense. It makes me wonder: What kind of a god wants robotic worship from automatons? Why not just make robots? Bergson drew forth the same questions.
When it came to authoritarian regimes, Bergson would have agreed with Czech diplomat, writer and human rights activist, Michael Zantovsky, who says that laugher is the sound of democracy. Being free to laugh, having the freedom to laugh at authority is a value never to take for granted.
For humans, absentmindedness is dangerous. When we outsource our thoughts, beliefs, and our personal morality to authority we automate by adoption and this kind of absentminded obedience is seen in oppressed human experience too grave for laughter.
Today there is a “holy war” created and supported by rigid religious doctrines and the lack of laughter is deafening.
Today there is oppression of LGBTQ+ people in the United States because of stubborn religious-driven bigotry and the lack of laughter is deafening. The lack of laughter is the perennial red flag.
In the end, Bergson knew the enormity of the task as he witnessed Nazi occupation of his home just before his death in 1941 at the age of 81. I like to imagine his last comedic acts as exaggerated Nazi “heils” at grandfather clocks, lamp posts, and traffic signs. Or mechanistic military marching ill-fitted to flights of stairs, rotating doors or sidewalk traffic. I can imagine Bergson impersonating a dead-eyed drooler enraptured by Hitlerian rhetoric from a radio. He would find a way to make fun of Nazism, to ridicule the ridiculous.
Being absent from our minds and unconscious of our rigid beliefs and biases is like being absent from our lives. Bergson stops there for a clear line between comedy and tragedy, but I see the tragedy of an unexamined life. I’m like a rubbernecker at my own accident scene where the only survivor is the one who can laugh at herself.
Thanks for this cheery Sunday morning sermon, Janet. I agree that laughter undercuts our mechanical behavior (mechanical laughter is particularly annoying). A part of me still thinks, though, that what Trump and his henchmen are doing is no laughing matter.
Right? The lack of laughter is the red flag.
Thank you, Janet, for the simple reminder of what helps keep us balanced as humans. Good to note as we scuffle through our daily lives.