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Bergson's thesis on laughter is beautifully simple: laughter is the recognition of our failure to submit life to mechanism. In a joke or a gag, some plan or schema breaks down. Knock-knock jokes create in us an anticipation that the punch line brings to an abrupt end. Slapstick characters are restricted to such a narrow range of movements that they are defeated in the simplest of tasks. A speaker who repeats the same gestures is funny because, while his thoughts seem to be fluid and to change with the progression of his speech, his physical expression lags behind it. Things that are funny always concern a discord between what we had planned and what is actually occurring, between expectation and contingency, and so ultimately between mechanism and vitality. At the heart of the comic is a profound absent-mindedness. We laugh when it seems as though life had forgotten to move forward and instead skipped and repeated itself like a broken record. In this way, laughter unites our most trivial encounters (a banana peel on the road) with the greatest flights of intellectual abstraction so that we may suppose that anyone who laughs has arrived at a metaphysical insight into the rela- tion of spontaneity and repetition, life and art, or even being and event.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230282995_5

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