Reviews for Fresh Air: Laughs

The average rating for Fresh Air: Laughs based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-11-05 00:00:00 Nick Ali This is a really interesting read. I was expecting this to say something like, "Comedy is due to the unexpected - something we don't expect happens and so we laugh". That is, I was expecting to be bored out of my mind. Then a lot of his examples were from plays I've never read - so it would be like someone talking about comedy with sole reference to Friends or Seinfeld - two shows I've never seen an entire episode of - this made following some of his points much harder than it ought to have been. This was anything but boring, though. He starts by saying that humour is essentially social. He makes an awful lot of this little idea. I'm not going to trace his argument - as this is a very short essay, and one I really can recommend. It is also available from Project Gutenberg. So, you are sitting at a café and someone comes running down the street and trips, stumbles and falls. You laugh. Why? There is no point denying that you would laugh - Australia's Funniest Home Videos has been going for age based primarily around people falling over. Bergson's idea is that we laugh because the person falling over has stopped being a person. If by person we mean someone that is able to freely choose what they can do, clearly someone tripping over isn't really acting as a person at that moment. He says they are in fact acting in a mechanical way. If they had been acting as a 'human' they would have side-stepped the thing that tripped them up and gone on their way. Being human is fluid and implies change and adjustment to meet the needs of the moment. Tripping, then, is symbolic of all things that are less than human. It is the runner going on mechanically, despite it causing them to fall, that we find funny. He sees the equation, person as machine equals funny as a motif that is repeatedly available in our humour. And not just in slapstick humour, but also in verbal and situational humour too. We find stereotypes funny because they can be relied upon to act in a way that will be mindlessly followed or carried on according to a kind of rule - and acting according to a rule is essentially acting mechanically. There is a really interesting point at which he says that humour must appeal to reason, and not the emotions. He makes this point by saying that a hunch-back can be funny - and this because we 'non-hunchbacks' can imitate a hunch-back's stoop and walk, and again, notice there is a kind of stiff, mechanical, 'human as machine' feel to how a hunchback walks. But, a cancer patient can't really be made to be nearly as funny. The things that cancel humour seem to be when we struggle to alienate the object of our humour from an emotional response and when the affliction under consideration isn't really one we can impersonate. Now, this brings us to the difference between comedy and tragedy. And this was the crowning moment of the essay for me. Comedy tends to deal with the general. It is possible, and in fact likely, that a comedy will be named after a general noun - The Sleepwalker or The Bridegroom, where as a tragedy will be named after a proper noun - Hamlet, Othello... Comedy is about types, recognisable and easily identifiable types who act out their behaviours according to their type. Again, these types are mechanical and it is their machine like behaviours that we find 'non-human' and therefore funny. Ironically, even though it is only the human we find funny, it is this particularly non-human aspect of the human that amuses us. Animals are only funny in so far as they remind us of humans. But humans are funny when they are least human. With tragedy we are always dealing with a very particular person. It is their individuality that makes them tragic. Even when the title of the play is quite general, The Death of a Salesman, say - the play can only really work as a tragedy in so far as the salesman, the main focus of the play, is not left as a caricature, but is given real depth of characterisation. Think of Hamlet and three hundred years of psychological arguments about his endlessly complex character. Now think of Falstaff. Bergson's point is that the comic character is always less than human. But this isn't really about us laughing and pointing at the freaks - our laughter serves a moral purpose for Bergson. Because we laugh at a mechanistic vision of humans, humans devoid of particularity, it is laughter that reverses the increasing pull on us towards humanity as 'machine'. Humour undermines all of our 'automatic' responses - our vanities as much as our unthinking and always just out of sight and unacknowledged selves - and forces a mirror up to us, so we can be 'human'. It forces us to be 'plastic', as he calls it, not stiff and mechanical. There were parts of this when I thought he was going to say that humour is awful because it is always us laughing at other people and that that is wrong - but while humour does involve us always laughing at other people, it is the 'non-human' in these other people that we find amusing and so humour is actually an affirmation of what is the truly human. I can't begin to tell you how interesting I find that idea.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-20 00:00:00 John Olsen One of the main reasons I'm glad I speak German is that I can understand Gerhard Polt. His humor does not translate well in other languages; his observations on German conservatism can be misinterpreted. Even his Bavarian dialect doesn't connect in some parts of the German-speaking world. One my greatest regrets is that I don't speak any other languages because I know I'm missing so many great laughs. I remember a few years back when my favorite television comedy, Fawlty Towers, was going to premiere in Germany'dubbed, of course'and being horrified by how poorly it translated. My friend looked at me and shook his head as he shamed me, "What's so funny about this?" It took me some time to elevate my standing in his eyes. My obsessive love for comedy led to me this philosophical nugget. The English translation of Henri Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic was published in 1911. Despite its age, many of his observations about humor still hold up. A fundamental concept to understand why people laugh is rigidity, or as I would call it: expectation. He uses the example of finding humor when we see someone walking who trips, staggers awkwardly and perhaps falls (if they don't get hurt, although some might find humor in that). When we expect a certain outcome, we can find humor in the unexpected. This is the essence of great slapstick in many silent movies. The opposite is also true. We see humor in events when our expectations do not happen. This type of comedy is universal. Laughter does not exist in a vacuum; to create and appreciate comedy, to link it to both the intellect and emotion, is uniquely human. When we see humor in animals, it is because we infer some human trait or activity in them. We do the same with inanimate objects. We must be able to compare or identify it with something we already understand, a frame of reference, be it experience, context, language or culture, is required. For example, when Bergson writes "[a]bsentmindedness is always comical," it conjures images of Lord Emsworth from P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle stories. We all have met someone like him. Moreover, cultural context and a frame of reference are needed to produce laughter. Or, as Bergson writes, "Comedy depicts characters we have already come across and shall meet again." Laughter bonds. Its "business [is] to repress any separatist tendency." To take this argument to its extreme, laughter creates community; the more we laugh together, the more we find common feelings among ourselves. These insights impress even more today because Bergson would not have known about Charlie Chaplin; what few Lumière-inspired films he may have seen were mostly technological novelties. He knew nothing about P.G. Wodehouse or stand-up comics or cartoons. He certainly couldn't have envisioned feature films with color and sound or television sitcoms. His views of "the comic" were based on personal experience and observations, reading, and from viewing plays, indeed many of his examples of humor are based on old French plays, especially by Molière:"You are only bound to treat people according to form," says Dr. Diaforius in the Malade imaginaire. Again, says Dr. Bahis, in L'Amour medicine: "It is better to die through following the rules than to recover through violating them."Bergson's humor seems to consist of a chuckle or a wry smile. I wonder if he ever experienced a gasping-for-air, snot-bubble-producing, tear-inducing kind of laugh. What would he have thought about a classic Marx Brothers scene or Groucho's quick quips? Or a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon? Would he have reveled in a classic routine by Bob and Ray? Would he have have been offended by the stereotyped Inspector Clouseau? I'm guessing he might have had some difficulties with Mel Brooks movies, but he might have loved some scenes from The History of the World, Part One. But one part of comedy for which he would likely have been unprepared is how important it has become help cope with social and political issues. In the U.S., George Carlin arguably gave birth to the genre with bits like Seven Dirty Words, which led to the Supreme Court, and the Ten Commandments. This has led to comedians like Jon Stewart, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee becoming the most honest journalists and social commentators in the U.S. today. Similar trends are taking place all over the world, two of my favorites being the characters Erwin Pelzig and Jonathan Pie. I would have loved to read Bergson's thoughts on this.