MIA > Archive > A. Bogdanov
Published in: Molodaya Gvardiya, issue 2, 1923. Reprinted in Vestnik Mezhdunarodnogo instituta A. Bogdanova, issue 2, 2000
Translation and notes by: Edmund Griffiths (2026).
Markup by: Graham Seaman for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Licence: Creative Commons CC-BY. To satisfy this license you need only acknowledge MIA as the source of the material and Edmund Griffiths as the translator, and provide a link to this page.
File uploaded: September 2026.
Of all the questions of theoretical aesthetics, the hardest is that of the essence of the comic. Why do particular things or events strike us as ‘funny’? What general law governs the extremely specific mental movement that bursts out convulsively in the act of laughter? The conditions that give rise to it are as varied as its manifestations, from the wild guffaw of cannibals during a pogrom to the shadow of a smile that slips across a serious face. How can this colossal wealth of data from mental and physical life be brought together? For a long time, attempts at an integral explanation remained unsuccessful. Numerous theories were created, each of them more or less applicable in a large number of cases but unsuited to a whole series of others. The problem has now been solved, and the reason for the previous failures becomes clear: people were looking for the secret of laughter in the wrong place. They tried to find it in the soul of the lone individual, in individual experiences—chiefly experiences of the contemporary individual, formed on the basis of millennia of culture. They should have been looking much deeper and much wider...
Two thinkers, who supplement one another superbly, can help us to overcome all the obstacles on the road to the shrine of the goddess of laughter and tear the veil from her so mysterious, yet so familiar figure.
One is Ludwig Noiré, a profound German with a French surname. He was a great scholar, the first to explain the origin of human language, a revolutionary in linguistics.[1] He gives us the guiding idea, the general principle to solve our problem. Weighty, serious, he does not study laughter and the comic in particular; he casts only a single glance at them, but the glance is that of a genius.
And the other is Henri Bergson, a witty Frenchman with a German surname. He is a remarkable philosopher, a thoroughgoing reactionary, in his own field the most talented defender of an obsolescent metaphysics. Very educated, a subtle dialectician, he deploys scientific material with aplomb, arranging all that is dark and obscure in human experience to build a fortress for philosophical reaction. One of his works[2] is devoted specially to the question of laughter, and it is full of clever analysis and brilliant generalizations. He is probably not even aware of Noiré’s view of laughter; and he would not be flattered, in all likelihood, to learn that we propose to subordinate all his conclusions—permitting a quick and easy survey of the kingdom of laughter—to the single general idea that Noiré provides.
This is not, as a matter of fact, an uncommon turn of events. Noiré himself, a follower of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, would scarcely have been flattered to learn that his theory of the origin of language would serve to buttress the scientific socialist worldview... But that is another question, and perhaps we shall raise it on another occasion. For the present let us return to our topic of the day, and begin with Bergson.
The first fact that his analysis captures is laughter’s social character.
‘You would hardly appreciate the comic,’ says Bergson, ‘if you felt yourself isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo. Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. It may, perchance, have happened to you, when seated in a railway carriage or at table d’hote, to hear travellers relating to one another stories which must have been comic to them, for they laughed heartily. Had you been one of their company, you would have laughed like them; but, as you were not, you had no desire whatever to do so. A man who was once asked why he did not weep at a sermon, when everybody else was shedding tears, replied: “I don’t belong to the parish!” What that man thought of tears would be still more true of laughter. However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.’ And the author goes on to conclude:
‘To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society...’
Anyone can easily verify the truth of this from personal experience. Everyone knows the dissatisfied feeling that arises from being unable to share your impressions of the comic with others; laugher itself sounds false and unnatural as soon as you notice that no-one is laughing with you.
But the fact that laughter is social is only the first of its characteristics. Bergson defines another essential feature as insensitivity, ‘a momentary anesthesia of the heart’.
‘Laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to become interested in everything that is being said and done; act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything...’
It is clearly a matter of social feeling or sympathy. And in essence Bergon is correct: anyone, if they are only capable of observing their own mind, can confirm what he says. Assume, for example, that there is black ice on the pavement, and you see one passer-by after another come to the slipperiest spot and fall over. Someone with a sensitive, responsive cast of mind will not find this funny at all; a hooligan will think it is the best thing they have ever seen. But look, here comes an important gentleman in an expensive fur coat: your democratic eyes fix him with involuntary, unconscious hostility. He, like any other mortal, falls over—and you let out a sudden burst of laughter. The very next moment, the laughter breaks off and you feel ashamed; your social feeling has come back into its own. But if the same lamentable incident had happened to one of your nearest and dearest, or to a child, or even just to a person who looked nice, then no thought of humour would have found a place in your consciousness for an instant. Sympathy, or social feeling, suppresses comedy; laughter is only possible to the extent that this factor is absent, or is momentarily silenced.
But is not laughter itself social? It is. It is social because it is a shared feeling, binding together those who laugh together. More than that: the best soil for laughter is hostility or struggle. The kinship between laughter and anger is something everyone knows from their own experience. Laughter is a powerful, cruel weapon in social struggle. The laughter of Ulrich von Hutten[3] hurt his enemies no less than the sword that this son of knights also knew how to wield. Heine’s laughter wounded, like a thin, sharp rapier in the hands of a superlative fencer. And Shchedrin’s...[4]
There is, as Noiré observes, something ‘demonic’ about laughter, something mysterious, which causes an onlooker anxiety and unease. And it is no coincidence that the shape of the mouth when laughing resembles the mouth of a predator, gleefully baring its teeth at the sight of its defenceless prey...
Imagine a throng of primordial savages who have just exerted themselves in a fierce battle and emerged victorious. Some of the enemy have been slain or have fled; others, bound or injured, are in the victors’ power. But the collective excitement of battle cannot dissipate all at once. The leftover arousal finds expression in collective sounds: the wild, gleeful laughter of the throng.
Open, merry laughter, says Noiré, ‘is derived from grinning and baring the teeth and from the accompanying cries of pleasure, of a gratification felt collectively, emitted when the tribe or herd’s victorious exertions had overcome an enemy... The same collective sense of superiority was also expressed in sardonic laughter, the devilish grin induced in the assembled troop by the sight of a bound and cruelly tormented enemy—the jerks, the dislocated limbs, the vain efforts to escape the torments being inflicted.’[5]
This is where laughter begins: this is the explanation of it. The subject is a group or collective; the object is an enemy, a hunted animal, or in general terms a being excluded from the bonds of society; the content is a sense of superiority. And these three points can easily be traced through the whole line of laughter’s development, from crude, primordial forms to the mildest and most cultivated.
Bergson, analysing different varieties of the comic, discovers one feature that he believes they all share. He formulates it like this: we find comic anything in people, or their actions, or their characteristics, that suggests something machine-like, clumsy, lacking in vital flexibility and adaptability. If society’s life is to be full and harmonious, it needs its members to possess plasticity of organization, to be able to change freely and easily to suit the prevailing conditions and manage those conditions creatively. And society persecutes and punishes any failure to be sufficiently plastic by means of laughter.
Why, for example, can it seem funny if a person is walking along quickly and then stumbles and falls over? Because at that moment their body is obeying not their will, but the mechanical inertia that keeps their head and trunk moving even though the feet have encountered an obstacle. Why are reactionary, antediluvian opinions funny? Because clinging onto them signifies mental immobility, an insufficient capacity for development. Why is a pun funny? Because the employment of one and the same combination of words for two very different meanings reveals a lack of flexibility in our language, a concealed machine-like aspect of the means we use to express our experience.
Through juxtapositions like these, Bergson uncovers the same basis underlying the most diverse comic effects, which he reduces to a few categories.
The comedy of deformity. Acute, extreme deformity is not funny: it is repellent or frightening. Only moderate deformity is comical—the kind that a normal physiology can reproduce by making an effort. For example, a face that looks like a normal face’s grimace is funny. This is because it is perceived as an immobile, frozen grimace: the face seems to lack flexibility, as though it once took on a grimace and now cannot go back to normal. According to Bergson, a caricature makes us laugh by capturing and emphasizing the characteristic fixed grimace in a person’s face and figure. These are elements of deformity of which the person in question can never be rid: they thus reveal a lack of physiological flexibility.
The comedy of repetition. Two faces, neither of which on its own is funny in the slightest, together evoke a sense of comedy if they are excessively similar. They make one think of mechanical reproduction, as though, say, they had been cast from the same model. An orator’s gesture, in itself not remotely funny, becomes comical through frequent repetition: it expresses a concealed automatism in the speaker, who comes to resemble a wind-up toy that keeps repeating the same motions.
A distinguishing feature of comic personalities is their stubborn limitation, leading them to apply—repeatedly and as if automatically—the same point of view, the same devices of speech and action, in the most varied circumstances, which call for equally diverse adaptations. A police constable rescues a naked drowning man from the water, revives him—and then asks to see his papers. An advertising executive arrives in some town and, when he hears there is an extinct volcano nearby, exclaims indignantly, ‘They had a volcano—and they let it go out.’ And so on.
We shall go no further with Bergson. It is easy to see that not all is well with his ‘principle of the comic’. Where will we find more automatism, more repetition of gesture, than in an army on parade; and is that funny? The significance of rhythm and rhyme in poetry comes down to ‘mechanical’ repetition of sounds; but do rhythm and rhyme make us laugh? Noiré’s principle, however, at once explains everything.
Mechanism, automatism, lack of flexibility are characteristics of lifeless things and the lower forms of life. When we observe the same in people, or in their words or actions, then those people consequently acquire for us a colouring of something alien and at once lower; for a moment, at least, they are excluded from the social bonds we perceive, and we directly sense our own superiority to them: all the elements of laughter, as set out by Noiré.
The guffaws of a rapist, enjoying the victim’s anguish, include all these elements; and we can also find them in our own easy smile when a child asks us a naïve question. The scheme is the same, although the form is infinitely milder. It is as though the naïvety of the question excludes the child from the collective of rational people, and reminds us of that collective’s superiority—a slight ghost of the victory celebration, with no battle. The automatism of an army does not make us feel our own superiority; for that reason, it is not comical. Immediate, lively sympathy does not permit any exclusion from the social sphere; for that reason, it is a foe to laughter.
There was a Catholic saint who did not need a lamp to read long into the night: he used the light from his own halo. In an Italian peasant, this image would have evoked a feeling of piety; an old-fashioned scholastic would have wanted to establish the properties of the light from a saint’s halo deductively. For us, the image is comic. Why?
This is a mild reflection of the triumph of our own cultural collective, its victory over its exhausted and powerless enemy: religious-materialist thinking...
It is no coincidence that all previous revolutions in Europe—including our first, in 1905—were accompanied by explosions of humour. In essence, this is the same scheme as in Noiré’s sketch of the origin of laughter: the collective’s leftover warlike arousal is the source of the laughter; the dethroned enemy is its object; and its content is the sense of superior strength. And it is clear why there was no such explosion of laughter in our latest revolutions. The peoples’ strength had been drained by the unprecedented war, and there was no surplus of militant excitement: all there was left of it was needed for other purposes...
1. Noiré held that language originated in collective labour. — Translator’s note.
2. Le rire (1900). Quotations from this book are taken from the authorized English translation by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, which is available from Project Gutenberg. — Translator’s note.
3. (1488–1523), knight and satirist. He appears as a character in Lassalle’s play Franz von Sickingen. — Translator’s note.
4. Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–1889), Russian satirical writer. — Translator’s note.
5. Translation verified against the original: Ludwig Noiré, Die Ursprung der Sprache (Mainz: Victor von Zabern, 1877), p. 327. — Translator’s note.
Last updated on 26 August 2026