HENRI BERGSON WAS a polyhistor, a Renaissance man of great learning, combining philosophy, diplomacy, the élan vital and the echo of laughter. Bergson was made a professor at the Collège de France in the same year as Le Rire appeared. His lectures attracted a wide following, T.S. Eliot attended. He was sent as an envoy to meet President Wilson in 1913 and represented France on diplomatic missions to Spain in 1917. Bergson then started work with the US government to prepare for The League of Nations and was appointed President of the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation (the later UNESCO) in 1922, a post he held for five years. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature after the posting.

In three articles in Revue de Paris, ‘Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique’ (1899), Bergson outlined a philosophical argument for laughter and the comic imagination.

He pointedly asks ‘what does laughter mean?’ What is comic and ridiculous, why do we laugh? He immediately warns that this question has challenged philosophers ever since Aristotle. In view of the elusiveness of the topic Bergson does not wish to ring-fence and define the comic spirit, but approach it with an open mind as ‘a living thing’ and treat it with respect. Rather than an abstract definition, Bergson seeks a flexible approach and acquaintance that springs from a long companionship, an understanding of the human imagination in a social context. Laughter is a social gesture.

Bergson makes three opening remarks:

• 1. The comic is an exclusive human activity.

• 2. Laughter demands an absence of feeling and emotion, it appeals to the intelligence.

• 3. Laughter needs an echo, it is the shared laughter of a group.

He starts by looking at the comic element in forms and movements, the expansive force of the comic. External circumstances, like a stone on the road that makes a runner fall, or the success of a practical joke, are comic because of a certain absentmindedness of the victims. More importantly, the comic element may lodge in the person himself, revealing the rigidity of a fixed idea: Don Quixote falls into a well because he was looking at the stars.