Notes and Study Questions for the Production Code and Bergson

The following notes and study questions are designed to help you understand and think through issues raised by both the Production Code and the excerpt from Bergson's book.  We do not expect you to submit formal written answers to the questions.  If you have difficulty answering the questions, raise those difficulties in class discussion.

The Production Code (enforced summer 1934 to late 1950s)

You work in the Hays Office.  Let's say for argument's sake that you
screen two new films, I'm No Angel and Duck Soup.  What about each film must go back to the studio for revision?  Why?

Bergson, excerpt from Laughter

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was an eminent French philosopher.  He wrote a small book on laughter (Le Rire) in 1900, exactly 100 years ago.  Most of what he analyzed in this wonderful essay is what Freud will, a few years
later, call "the comic."  Note that the comic isn't the only funny type of thing that causes laughter.  We'll study other laughable phenomena soon, but Bergson really formulates "the comic" and the mechanism of laughing in
an intriguing and original way.

A.  (1) Do you agree that the comic must always involve something human?  Is there such a thing as a comical event involving weather, or something else completely nonhuman?

(2) Absence of feeling necessary for laughter to occur: Bergson says
that to laugh at the person slipping on a banana peel, we have to not be
concerned emotionally for that person.  Then how can you laugh at yourself if you trip and fall?  Does Bergson's idea still work?

(3) Laughter is always laughter of an implied group; it is social.

B. Once you've read the entire selection, recall that Noel Carroll based his sight-gag study on a theory that comedy arises from incongruity. Bergson's emphasis is quite different.  Could their two theories overlap. or are they mutually incompatible?

Laughter happens when we witness a person's clumsiness, inelasticity,
rigidity, automatism, "unconsciousness," etc.  List the attributes/failings that lead to laughter in Bergson's eyes, and understand what he's getting at.

For Bergson, the essence of being alive is being "aware," in touch with
the environment and able to adapt to changes, being flexible, having
"tension and elasticity" (p. 72).

How is laughter "a sort of social gesture"?  What kind of gesture?  How
does it function in Bergson's view as a corrective?  Correcting what?

C. Which of the film situations and comedians seen thus far in the course
are "comic" in Bergson's definition?  Which do not accord with his definition?

• W.C. Fields
• losing his glasses and asking where they are,
• forgetting the ice on the stove,
• leaving the fat man in the steam room too long,
• claiming credit for catching the thief

• Buster Keaton
• slipping on the banana peel he planted for his rival
• ingeniously escaping the criminals' lair with the old lady costume on
• watching the movie screen to see how to kiss and propose to his girlfriend
• rescuing his girlfriend by disguising her as a sack of shoes

• Harold Lloyd
• continuing to crawl on the dept. store floor when the
• cart he was hiding behind has turned away
• climbing anxiously up the side of the building

• Charlie Chaplin 
• vamping for the camera in Kid Auto Races
• continuing to turn his wrenches after he's off the assembly line
• carrying a ladder and hitting his co-worker as he turns with it
• dismantling an alarm clock, holding a stethoscope to it

• Mae West 
• saying suggestive and witty things to and about men

• Katharine Hepburn
• not knowing her evening gown is ripped in the restaurant

• Cary Grant    
• "I'll be with you in a minute, Mr. Peabody"

• Hepburn and Grant 
• crawling around trying to communicate with George to get the bone
• becoming Donald the Duck and Swingin' Door Susie