Das Lachen

What is the essence of laughter? What lies behind the ridiculous? What do a clown's grimace, a pun, a mix-up in a farce, and a witty comedy scene have in common? In his elegantly written essay 'Laughter', which was published in three separate articles in the 'Revue de Paris' in 1900 and successfully released as a book a year later, Henri Bergson develops a theory of the comic as a social relationship. He focuses primarily on ridicule: examining many examples under three different aspects (movement comedy, situational and verbal comedy, character comedy), Bergson investigates why something appears ridiculous to us and concludes that it is always the transition from the living to the mechanical, to automatism, or the 'mechanical in the living' that provokes laughter. 'Laughter' already addresses this.