| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Please visit www.ArcManor.com for other works by this and other great authors.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
First Sentence
What does laughter mean? Read the first page
Front Cover | Table of Contents | Excerpt
What does laughter mean? Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Table of Contents | Excerpt
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Bergson's study of the comic really is a benchmark. There's Freud on Jokes, and Bergson on laughter. They're not too far from each other in time, and they're both central reading if you want to understand why we laugh and with what consequences.
The beauty of Bergson's account, I think, is his complete disregard of easy solutions. He doesn't care if people laugh at him for writing a non-comic account of the comic (what alternative is there?), but neither does he claim that laughter is humanity's salvation or doom.
For example, he says it makes us flexible: so we can criticise or conform to society. Laughter is an ambiguous thing, and Bergson knows it.
I'm afraid I haven't read the French, so can't comment on the translation. It's excellent value for money, though, and the only drawback is the big floppy format espoused by this series.
Buy it: it's short and cheap, so there's no excuse not to.
The beauty of Bergson's account, I think, is his complete disregard of easy solutions. He doesn't care if people laugh at him for writing a non-comic account of the comic (what alternative is there?), but neither does he claim that laughter is humanity's salvation or doom.
For example, he says it makes us flexible: so we can criticise or conform to society. Laughter is an ambiguous thing, and Bergson knows it.
I'm afraid I haven't read the French, so can't comment on the translation. It's excellent value for money, though, and the only drawback is the big floppy format espoused by this series.
Buy it: it's short and cheap, so there's no excuse not to.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
9 reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Enormously provocative
12 Nov 2000
Format:Paperback
Yes, it is true: Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy is funnier than this analysis of laughter. But they are equally provocative. Bergson's thesis may not suit all of us, but it must challenge even those of us involved in the comedic professions to re-examine why people laugh. I think his observation of what makes something funny as opposed to tragic - the elimination of emotion - is pretty spot on. How else could we laugh at someone falling down the stairs? The moment we think of the actual pain or humiliation, the comedy dies at least a little. While the book does not directly attack the magic of those beings, clowns and tricksters, who simulataneaously inspire laughter and sadness and/or fear, the principles of the book lead to what sorts of rules these people follow. If you can extraploate from the thought laid out here, many, many questions will be answered and perhaps even more raised. Which makes this an indispensible book for anyone in the performing arts. Highly, highly recommended.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
A bit dated. Somewhat incomplete. Astoundingly insightful
10 May 2005
Format:Paperback
Before reading this essay, you should be forewarned that it was written by the same great opponent of Cartesian dualism that resisted the reduction of psychological phenomena to physical states. In other words, this is an early 20th century French philosophical essay. To go further, it's a bit dry. Still, it is hard to argue with many of the axioms that Bergson espouses in this essay. For the most part, the laughter caused by much of modern comedy can be explained using one of his primary axioms or their many corollaries. Bergson's biggest miss here, however, is that although he adequately explains why a comic may cause an individual to laugh at either the comic himself or a third party, he doesn't sufficiently explain, or even realize, that much of what the comic intends is for his audience to laugh at themselves. Even so, you can still ascribe Bergson's incisive deductions to include the comic audience and still come to the heart of why people laugh. In any event, to my knowledge the subject has never been tackled so logically. Certainly, no (funny) comedian will ever attempt to publicly disclose the nature of laughter, but don't suppose that there aren't many famous comedians out there today who are familiar with this essay. It is obvious that many comedians and writers are familiar with this essay and that they have put these axioms directly to the test to great comic effect on many occasions. A word of advice to anyone who has difficulty wading through the chapters of Bergson's dry, recondite language: Read it in your head with the voice of baby Stewie from the Family Guy in mind. This technique amused me through the first half of the book, and by that time the language didn't bother me so much anymore.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Still profound after all these years
24 Mar 2003
Format:Paperback
Why is a pun amusing? In brief, it treats something human as if it were something mechanical. Language is a way of conveying meanings from one human to another, and the most inflexible, most mechanical, most artifiial POSSIBLE way of looking at words is to classify them by their sound alone. That's precisely what a pun does.
When Mel Brooks is playing a Polish actor playing Hitler, he says: "All I want is peace. A little piece of Poland, a tiny piece of France...." That is amusing -- the juxtaposition of the vital and the mechanical.
More sophisticated jokes than such puns are based on the same juxtaposition. Here is one of Bergson's example, from a play by Labiche. "Just as M. Perrichon is getting into the railway carriage, he makes certain of not forgetting any of his parcels: 'Four, five, six, my wife seven, my daughter eight, and myself nine.'"
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
