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Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
Paperback
$22.99
By Henri Bergson, Wyndham Lewis (Afterword), Simon Critchley (Introduction), Cloudesley Brereton (Translator), Fred Rothwell (Translator)
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Why do we laugh? What does comedy reveal about human nature, society, and the mind’s strange elasticity?
In this classic 1900 essay, philosopher Henri Bergson anatomises the comic impulse with surgical clarity and lyrical wit. For Bergson, laughter is no mere reflex. It is a social gesture, a corrective, a way for life itself to defend its supple intelligence against rigidity and habit. From pratfalls to irony, from the mechanical in the living to the absurd in the everyday, his argument ran...
In this classic 1900 essay, philosopher Henri Bergson anatomises the comic impulse with surgical clarity and lyrical wit. For Bergson, laughter is no mere reflex. It is a social gesture, a corrective, a way for life itself to defend its supple intelligence against rigidity and habit. From pratfalls to irony, from the mechanical in the living to the absurd in the everyday, his argument ran...