“[Comedy cannot] produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of the soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.” Yet it “does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable.“I — Henri Bergson, via Sally O’Reilly, ‘Things Fall Apart,’ Frieze Magazine.
Henri Bergson, ‘Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic’, 1899; repr. Macmillan & Co., London, 1935, pp. 3–21 [↩]
On the Meaning of the Comic
“[Comedy cannot] produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of the soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.” Yet it “does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable.“I — Henri Bergson, via Sally O’Reilly, ‘Things Fall Apart,’ Frieze Magazine.