Abstract
Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter and the comic sees them as dependent upon a ‘temporary anaesthesia of the heart’ or a lack of sympathy. Elsewhere, Bergson stressed the important idea that rapprochement between people should accompany material and mechanical progress (Creative Evolution). Underpinning and reconciling these two conflicting ideas are the philosopher’s innovative concepts of time and personal freedom. He distinguished between mechanical repetitive time and the experience of time that varies between individuals. The first suppresses freedom and creativity and the second fosters it. Bergson argued that laughter resulting from comedy can be part of a human(e) and humanising reaction to domination by mechanical time—a way to regain lost sensibilities. This study assesses the utility of Bergson’s comic analysis by applying it to popular farce from a very different time and culture: the kyōgen of the classical nō theatre of Japan. The selected text is Busu (Poison), English translation by Sakanashi (1960).
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Notes
- 1.
Bergson’s work, originally appearing as three essays in the Revue de Paris in 1899, was first published in French as a book in 1900 and in an authorised English translation in 1910. Of the many subsequent editions, the twenty-third of 1924 is significant since it contains a new preface and appendix in which the author explains and updates his thinking. That edition is available online at Project Gutenberg (2003) but without pagination. The text cited here is a modern edition of the authorised English translation. References to page numbers are given in brackets after quotations. I do not aim to provide a complete summary ofLaughter but to focus on the comic devices and techniques that Bergson observed at work in comic entertainment of his time.
- 2.
‘The Actors Home’ 1953 version (copyright Koch Entertainment) is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTcRRaXV-fg (accessed 14 October 2019).
- 3.
Translated as ‘lack of sprightliness’, 26.
- 4.
See Latta, The Basic Humor Process, 109. The term humour is used in this chapter in its modern broad umbrella sense to embrace any and all instances of the laughable. Bergson himself did not use the term, which had then (and still does) in French a distinctly English connotation of gentle, benign humour—see note 26.
- 5.
ParticularlyTime and Free Will (originally published in French in 1889) and Creative Evolution (1907).
- 6.
For example, Oring, Engaging Humor, 11; Milner Davis, ‘Bergson and the Theory of the Comic’.
- 7.
For example, Morreall, The Philosophy of Laughter, 15.
- 8.
Examples of how he is usually dismissed appear below. Other more recent advocates of laughter as a reflection of the superiority of the laugher over a victim such as Charles Gruner usually receive equally dismissive treatment.
- 9.
Recent psychological studies on personality traits and humour by Willibald Ruch and colleagues examining the use of benevolent and corrective humour (e.g. Ruch et al., ‘Broadening humor’) are a significant exception to this preference for rose-coloured glasses about the nature and effects of humour.
- 10.
See the careful discussion of Bergson as a superiority theorist in Sinclair, Bergson, 145.
- 11.
Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 59.
- 12.
Carrell, ‘Historical Views’, 375.
- 13.
Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 59; Carrell, ‘Historical Views’, 375; Martin, The Psychology of Humor, 44; Provine, Laughter, 16–17; Scheel, ‘Definitions, Theories, and Measurement’.
- 14.
I am indebted to Alexander Lefebvre for drawing this study to my attention and also for expert advice on contemporary Bergsonian studies, in particular for information about his own studies of Bergson and human rights.
- 15.
Milner Davis, ‘Bergson and the Theory of the Comic’.
- 16.
Sinclair, Bergson, 145.
- 17.
Guerlac, Thinking in Time, sums up the movement for reappraisal that began with Gilles Deleuze’s study of him in 1966.
- 18.
Russell, [Untitled] review of Henri Bergson’s Laughter.
- 19.
Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 4.
- 20.
On Bergson and the Theory of Mind, see Robbins, ‘Bergson and the Holographic Theory of Mind’; on relativity, Dolbeault, ‘From Mind to Matter’. Bergson and Albert Einstein were caught up in the Franco-German tension between the Wars at a time when Bergson chaired the League of Nations’ Scientific Co-ordinating Committee and Commission for Intellectual Cooperation (1921–1926). However, it seems likely that, much to Bergson’s disappointment, it was their personal intellectual dispute that frustrated his efforts to retain Einstein as the sole German member of the Commission. Einstein had denounced the way in which Bergson’sDurée et simultanéité (Duration and Simultaneity), published in 1922, dealt with relativity.
- 21.
For relevant works, see note 5.
- 22.
See Bergson’s Laureate speech, delivered for him by the Committee’s President owing to his own inability to travel, which can be found at: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1927/bergson-speech.html (accessed 13 April 2020).
- 23.
See Worms, ‘Time Thinking’. The relevant Bergson work is Time and Free Will, significantly first published in 1889, the year that Bergson began his essay series resulting in the 1900 publication of Le Rire.
- 24.
Bergson, Time and Free Will, 99.
- 25.
Parkin, ’The Power of Laughter’, 120–121. For the evolutionary study of laughter, see Ross et al., ‘Reconstructing the Evolution’.
- 26.
Howarth, ‘Bergson revisited’; Noonan, ‘Reflecting Back’.
- 27.
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World.
- 28.
Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 8.
- 29.
Milner Davis, ‘Bergson’s Theory of the Comic’, 79–80.
- 30.
I am indebted to M. W. Shores for his expert advice, particularly on the history and background of kyōgen as an art-form and on details of interpretation of the text of Busu.
- 31.
Eleven English translations since 1917 are listed in Iezzi, ‘“Kyōgen” in English’, 216.
- 32.
For a concise overview of kyōgen, its history and nature, see Kominz, ‘Kyōgen’. For a bilingual Japanese-English performance that illustrates the traditional stage-setting, performance style and costumes of kyōgen, with Shigeyama Dōji playing Jirō Kaja, Shigeyama Ippei as Tarō Kaja and Hiromi Shimada as their master, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWxZhtPG0Nw (accessed 14 October 2019).
- 33.
Kominz, ‘Kyōgen’, 349.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Koyama, Kyōgenshū, vol. 1, 315–323; Sakanishi, Japanese Folk-Plays, 84–89. All Busu quotations are from this English edition which, oddly, is not included in Iezzi’s list published in 2007. English kyōgentranslations vary, reflecting a translator’s view of how much elaboration should be provided and also the tradition and text of the acting school being followed. Sakanishi’s text is succinct and restrained, not adding much in the way of stage directions and ‘business’ compared to others such as that by Don Kenny, ‘The Delicious Poison’.
- 36.
This summary follows Milner Davis, Farce, 7–8. Longer comedies usually possess a wider range than these four categories, although they are likely to include one or more of them within a larger structure that might for example be a festive romantic comedy, an extended satiricalparody or a bleak absurdist comedy.
- 37.
Discussed in Wells and Milner Davis, ‘Farce and Satire in Kyōgen’, 145–147.
- 38.
Oda has termed such containers, warai-no-ba, times and spaces for laughter (‘Laughter and the Traditional Japanese Smile’, 18). The idea of a playframe was not something considered by Bergson, but its importance in the transformation of rebellion and violence into comedy is undeniable and it certainly applies to Busu and kyōgen generally.
- 39.
One of the triumphs of kyōgen, as in Japanese traditional comedy more generally, is the skilled mimicry with which such actions are carried out, depending greatly upon the imaginative consent of the audience, as in the fanning to create imaginary wind.
- 40.
For a succinct account of manzai, see Katayama.
- 41.
In this particular play, prior knowledge of the stereotypes is reinforced by the fact that the play’s source is a well-known Buddhist tale (see note 33) so that the general outline of the story and its rebellion is already known to the audience.
- 42.
Soliloquies by comic stock characters such as Shakespeare’sFalstaff or the learned Doctor of the commedia dell’arte tend to be bombastic rather than insightful.
- 43.
While contemporary schools of performance do not make any reference to a possible fart joke here, it is always possible that before the scripts were standardised and sanitised in the early Edo period, such bodily stratum jokes were one of their highlights. For contemporary references to their vulgarity, see Wells and Milner Davis, ‘Farce and Satire in Kyōgen’, 146.
- 44.
In Kenny’s version of the play, the servants take turns in fanning as they repeatedly approach and then run away from the container.
- 45.
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 21–23.
- 46.
The trained kyōgen actor’s ability to convey this destruction through mime rather than actual smashing of jars and so on contributes an additional layer of comic incongruity, since portraying rigidity and clumsiness convincingly requires astounding flexibility and bodily control.
- 47.
For other farces with this overall structure, see Milner Davis, Farce, 105–119.
- 48.
Kominz, ‘Kyōgen’, 348–349.
- 49.
McGraw and Warren, ‘Benign Violations’, 1142.
- 50.
Milner Davis, ‘The Fool and the Path’, 235.
- 51.
For historical exceptions when a kyōgen piece was considered a threat and earned suppression, see Kominz, ‘Kyōgen’, 348.
- 52.
See Chafe, The Importance of Not Being Earnest, and Moreall, ‘The Philosophy of Humor’. Another link is to the ‘non-bona fide’ (not in good faith) mode of communication as opposed to bona fide identified as essential in the communication and comprehension of verbal humour (Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms).
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Milner Davis, J. (2020). Bergson’s Theory of the Comic and Its Applicability to Sixteenth-Century Japanese Comedy. In: Derrin, D., Burrows, H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56646-3_6
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