Le Rire : Essai sur la signification du comique - Henri Bergson

This short book of essays is an interesting introduction to some ideas around what is laughing, what is the role it plays, why some things/people/situations make us laugh but not others, but it never transcends its basic ideas, and ends up being more of a curio of its time than anything else.

Bergson here tries to explain why we laugh, but he does so in an overwrought style that only shines when he centers on examples and on keeping things simple. Many times he over-stretches himself and becomes over-convoluted and repetitive as, for example, when he keeps talking about rigidity, flexibility or mechanization. It is not that the ideas may be wrong, it is that, as with many other works of non-fiction that go around sociology/philosophy or similar topics, repetition sets in and two paragraphs of information and one of examples turn into 50 pages of rambling (one of the biggest problems of academic writing).

Again, some ideas of how what is different, or break the rules, or the relationship between the unreal and laughing may be interesting, but much of it is lost in the over-repetition that can't overcome an average explanatory style (far from the sarcasm of Virginia Woolf, for example). On top of that, some of the examples can feel really 'insulting', like when he says everyone laughs at people falling down (not really) or an example about people of color which nowadays feels really out of place.

The best: the examples; some ideas of the role laughing plays into our lives and as a a tool to organize society; the relationship he makes between the lack of empathy and feelings with laughing.

The worst: some of the examples look so out of place nowadays it's cringing; some of the ideas about what makes us laugh says more about how we (and Bergson back on his day) are socialized than anything else; it is quite superficial

Further reading: hmm... a difficult one; the role of laughter in Japanese society in "笑いの日本文化―「烏滸の者」はどこへ消えたのか?" by Higuchi Kazunori, for example; "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" by Richard M. Rorty to see a little bit about language/society/people; or "A Room of One's Own/Three Guineas" by Virginia Woolf to see some of the ways society is controlled, organized, compartmentalized? And then you have a lot of articles to check if you can pay them or are a member of a university.

6/10

(Spanish Translation by María Luisa Pérez Torres)