Labour Pains

[faustus]

"Henri Bergson was a French philosopher who was born 1859-1941." (Student essay)

But marking essays this PM has led to Thoughts. I need to think about my next conference paper - on the comedy of embarrassment.


Early Thoughts on the Comedy of Embarrassment:

That striking embarrassment when David Brent tells a racist joke or Larry David quibbles about a tip. I can't believe they actually said that... Why be embarrassed.

Various quotations from Bergson (Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudsley Brereton and Fred Roth. London: Macmillan and Co, Limited., 1911):

Humour exists in the realm of the human.

Laughter requires "a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple" (5)

"The comic will come into being, it appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play nothing but their intelligence." (8)

So comedy is the suspension of caring for the other - the end of empathy.

Yet laughter has a corrective function - but why would you correct them if you don't care about them? (A sentiment with real relevance as I'm marking essays...) Surely it's not just to insist on superiority.

The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine. (29)

So we laugh at David Brent, Larry Sanders, Rick Spleen, Larry David, Basil Fawlty because we don't care or empathise for their plight.

No, that doesn't feel right. There is a sense that we do want them to suffer - there's a Schadenfreude, a sadistic gaze Memo: If this isn't in Laura Mulvey it's in Steve Neale "Masculinity as Spectacle". We demand violence.

So why do we feel embarrassed and cringe at it? Is our superiority brought down by their inferiority? The always already castrated make us fear castration - if we want the Freudian 101 route.

I've been here before. Bergson's model of laughter offers an Martin Buber style I-It relationship because the other is object.

Whoever says Thou does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation.
. . . Those who experience do not participate in the world. For the experience is “in them” and not between them and the world.
The world does not participate in experience. It allows itself to be experienced, but it is not concerned for it contributes nothing, and nothing happens to it . . . The world as experience belongs to the basic word I-It.
The basic word I-Thou establishes the world of relation

(Buber I and Thou 1970: 55-6).

The I-It relation requires you to treat the other as object; the I-Thou relationship is reciprocal: you are Thou to the Thou.

“When man lets It have its way, the relentlessly growing It-world grows over him like weeds, his own I loses its actuality” (Buber 1970: 95-6)

Somewhere in here we have Levinas again:

One has to respond to one’s right to be, not by referring to some abstract and anonymous law, or judicial entity, but because of one’s fear for the Other. My being-in-the-world or my “place in the sun”, my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world; are these not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing?

I care for the other at expense to myself: I substitute for the other, feel their pain.

Or am I embarrassed because I know this and I still want the other to suffer?

To be continued....

Comments

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

"Henri Bergson was a French philosopher who was born 1859-1941."

And I thought being in labor from 3:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. was bad.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

Poor Mme Bergson!

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Interesting questions. Are your examples of embarrassing things actually funny? Or are they merely embarrassing things that have been labelled as 'Comedy' by people who don't find them embarrassing, or who think that others won't?

On the whole, if I find something embarrassing I don't find it funny, but I may well be on my own there.

It's a long time since I read any Bergson, but I remember thinking that his definition of comedy seemed very restrictive.