Essentially laughter is a reaction to, for example, the breakdown of normality. If it's not something that we're used to, we laugh at it as a form of corrective towards it. It's a social activity as well, so it's sheep laughing at the goat for being different and therefore weird and foreign to them, pretty much. It's incredibly cruel in that sense, but it also relieves stress for us. When you laugh, you generally feel pretty good, right? My old ICT teacher used to laugh all the time. Even when you were in trouble, she'd laugh at you. I heard her note herself that it was a nervous reaction to a situation. Basically, it's how she dealt with a slightly stressful situation. Not overly stressful, but somewhat. People deal with small amounts of stress in different ways; some obsessively rub their hands together, some hum, others - they laugh.
I was tasked with writing a seminar paper entitled Is Comedy The Acceptable Face of Cruelty? back in November, and I think I ought to share it. It's solid enough and it talks about Henri Bergson, a French philosopher, who came up with a theory of laughter. Anything I missed in the seminar that I want to cover here, I'll try to go into detail after:
When inebriated, we are stripped of all rational and logical thinking and, depending on the extent, we are devolved back into a primitive state. If given the simplest of tasks, chances are, we will probably fail; we enter automatic mode, and mechanically attempt to complete said task, but we will be unable to adapt to the situation if any new obstacles are presented. Onlookers will cruelly laugh at the stupidity and inability to conform.
An automatism is a 'being', so to speak, that is programmed to perform a certain task(s). However, it cannot adapt to its surroundings or the specific situation it winds up in; its evolution is stumped and therefore cursed in its default state. In other words, [it is] a stupid being, as anyone with a grain of intelligence could find they are abe to work around new obstacles that appear before them, whereas a programmed machine cannot.
Laughter is, in essence, the joy we receive from others' misfortune, particularly when we are devoid from consequence or guilt over the situation. For example, if someone falls and we don't see the aftermath say, we feel no sympathy for the person in question and can laugh completely guilt-free as it did not happen to us. Often in comedy, when what would be dangerous in real life feats are performed, the character walks away completely unscathed. The Plank is full of hazards where each and every character walks away as if nothing happened, and we can therefore laugh guilt-free. This complies to part of Bergson's theory of the emotional detachment we can endure.
Laughing at the expense of others' misfortune is a cruel reaction to undertake. Laughter is, as Bergson states in [his Theory of Laughter], a social stigma; when these social norms are broken, we find it absurd, and so we laugh. It can come about when witnessing an unexpected situation as well; it breaks away from the social norm that we are so used to. We, as a society, have set up a structure for ourselves to work within; again, we laugh at situations wherein this structure has been broken. There can be a degree of dramatic irony surrounding the character who suffers when we view such happenings in comedy. We, as an audience, know fine well that the character in question is in for a bad time, which can simply add to the hilarity of the situation.
When we laugh at the poor fool, it can be considered a type of punishment, or a corrective as such. As [A Drunk Demonstrates Henri Bergson's Theory of Laughter by Jonathan Lyons] states. 'if someone laughs at you, you tend to stop what you are doing', which is true in every which way; punishment via embarrassment. There is sheer intent of humiliation in laughter; [it is] never, ever innocent.
To an extent, laughter is usually a reaction to the result of witnessing something that does not conform to the norm; usually a misfortune that occurs to another where we are devoid from feelings of sympathy towards the victim. Bergson communicates his theory of laughter very well, and I agree with every word he says about it. We will no doubt laugh at anything that isn't deemed normal or wise to us. It's a reaction to when something logical breaks down and has everything to do with logic and absurdity and, as he said, 'we laugh at people or the things they do' so long as we are able to maintain 'a detached or an emotional distance' from the situation.
I will be quoting Bergson a lot from now on. In fact, I may already have done so, maybe even very, very recently. So what it all boils down to, is that laughter is a cruel corrective or 'punishment via embarrassment' to make the person stop what they're doing. However, remember I said earlier that laughing makes us feel good? Because it's a stress-relief? It's a protective barrier that we use to guard us from our own anxieties; laughter, helping us to diminish the traumatic or stressful event that is occurring to us, as according to Why We Laugh. It's also rather contagious, in that when one person laughs, another may start, and so on and so forth, which adds more anchorage to the fact that it is a social activity, generally speaking.
As I mentioned in my recent post, Unlucky Number Seven, farce is a type of comedy, incorporating a more physical side of comedy (known as slapstick), and is often quite crude; aiming below the belt. Where I don't want to base my short film solely around piss and fart jokes, I find absolutely nothing wrong with the aul' bedroom farce; dick joke galore. Maybe I'm just a pervert, but let's just leave it at that.
Anyway, I wanted to get the theory of laughter out of the way before I went on to talk about the relationship between laughter and sin. In Unlucky Number Seven, I did talk about some of the rules of farce, regarding an exploitation of 'appetites and follies of the average human being' in particular which, again, is what sinning all boils down to, really. But I also noticed that our laughing punishment towards those who do not conform, in regards to sinners, is actually a vicious, sinful circle.
No comments:
Post a Comment