Comedy: "An Essay on Comedy" by George Meredith. "Laughter" by Henri Bergson

Casting a critical eye on comic works throughout the ages, Meredith finds that the most skilled masters of the comic art—Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding, Molière—used comedy to grasp the essence of humanity. Comedy, according to Meredith's theory, serves an important moral and social function: it redeems us from our posturings, stripping away pride, arrogance, complacency, and other sins.

Bergson's essay looks at comedy within a wider field of vision, focusing on laught...