Emerson and Bergson on the Comic

Abstract

t N10 recent discussion of humor, declared Bliss Perry shortly after Bergson's Laughter had appeared, more illuminating and more directly applicable to the conditions of American life than that of the contemporary French philosopher Bergson.1 Professor Perry developed this statement by pointing out that Bergson's theory, insisting upon laughter as a social function, is particularly applicable to a newly settled country where incongruities are still largely unresolved. This is plausible enough; and the developments in American humor during the third of a century since Perry first made his remarks will bear him out. Our humor has been nothing if not social; of this, the present current of satire continues to offer abundant illustration. But did it remain for a twentieth-century Frenchman to develop a theory of the comic that would apply, in retrospect, to American conditions ? If Bergson did and does fit us, are there no hints at such an interpretation among our own philosophers? For a test of his observation, Professor Perry might well have turned to his own favorite Emerson; for, as we are about to see, there is more than a casual relationship between Emerson and Bergson. fact that Emerson's rather slight essay on The Comic (originally delivered as a lecture in 1839-40 and published in the Dial in 1843) has lain imbedded in Letters and Social Aims may explain why scholars have not sooner caught the interesting parallels between Emerson's view of the comic and that of Bergson; for it is clear, upon inspection, that the primary conceptions of the two men are quite similar, rising from correspondingly similar (though by no means identical) views of man and his affairs. In a realm of criticism where disagreement has long been notoriously violent, any extensive agreement between a pair of thinkers separated by a generation is worth exploring.