Content
for the course digital media now — mapping contemporary conditions
supervisor — Andrea Sick
Introduction Henri Bergson in his essay Laughter written in 1900 decomposes the notion of humour, tracing its causes and patterns, determining principal categories, and reaching the origin of laughter. He claims that the vital mechanics are polar categories and the “deviation of life towards the mechanical is … the true cause of laughter.“ He uses several types of “laughter mechanisms” as metaphors for the comical in language: the jack-in-the-box, the dancing-jack, the snowball.
Bergson embeds these mechanisms in his theory of humour and uses it to explain more complex, language, position and character comedy. At the same time, humanity finds these mechanisms entertaining and hilarious by themselves, mostly, as Bergson argues, because “human attitude or expression” can be detected in them.
In this paper, I will observe the work of Digital Media artists working in the field of funny machines and disassemble the comical in their artworks. Apart from this, I will review the main theories of humour and associate them with examples from work in the field of digital media (I will use the lvowercase spelling).
Apart from a biological perspective, humanity observes and conceptualises humour in various contexts, including psychological, semantic, computer modelling, philosophical, sexological, sociological, cultural and others. Some even refer to humour as a mystical experience.
Humour is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. Originally, the word humour (Latin: humor) was used as a term for the balance of fluids in the human body, which controls a person's health and emotions (The Four Humours, 2004).
Overall, humour is more determined than laughter. Laughter is the reaction itself, the process once something amusing already happened. It is an instrument to transform the feeling into the action, a mechanical process involving contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system.
Mikhail Lomonosov in Doctrine about three styles put satire above comedy. In satire, sarcasm, irony in addition to trying to cause laughter, there are also additional goals, such as to teach morality or to draw attention to an existing problem. In this classification comedy is considered to be the in the lowest of three styles, while other folklore genres such as ditties, anecdotes weren’t even included. These genres were considered to be too vulgar since they focus too much on a human body. Citing Knight:
“The humour of medieval carnival, according to Bakhtin, relied on the way that the body makes a mockery of the lofty purposes of the mind. Buttocks, thighs, coughs, splutters, farts, ‘the bodily lower stratum’ – all mock the spiritual solemnities of humourless bishops and other supposed guardians of morality.”
While humour is considered to be focused around proper wording and words in general, not only words can provoke laughter. Henri Bergson in the work Laughter decomposes this phenomenon and tries to define the comic. He claims that “the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple” (Bergson, 1921: 5). So to laugh, first, humans need to disable empathy and become more rational.
Bergson believes that the reason for the comic is the mechanical inelasticity of people in certain situations:
“Instead of concentrating our attention on actions, comedy directs it rather to gestures. …the attitudes, the movements and even the language by which a mental state expresses itself outwardly without any aim or profit, from no other cause than a kind of inner itching” (Bergson, 1921: 143).
This proves that comedy works on many levels besides semantic: linguistic, behavioural, psychological. “The comic person is unconscious” (Bergson, 1921: 16). This point is crucial for Bergson, since it leads to the more precise outline of the comical: it is a “game that imitates life” on every level, including mechanic, which is considered to be too inferior for drama (Bergson, 1921: 69).
He analyses human face and body from the comical perspective, and observes it in a poetic passage:
“…our imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. ... Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It draws to itself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle, would fain convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mere automatism. ... Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the body, an effect that is comic” (Bergson, 1921: 29).
This leads him to the conclusion: “deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of laughter” (Bergson, 1921: 34). And another one: “Any arrangement of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement” (Bergson, 1921: 69).
In human body soul is the power which is shaping matter. But non-humanic bodies (mechanisms) also have a certain final form, perhaps not as advanced and sleek as living bodies. Is humanisation the only way to bring life into matter? What is the soul for mechanical?
Robots and their behaviour, according to the study of Dr. Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten, can be perceived by humans as their kind (Choi, 2013).
“Her research, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggests that we empathize with robots treated both affectionately and violently as if they were our fellow man. It gets your mind going: Might our brains operate similarly when watching unscripted robot fails?”
(Anderson, 2015).
Answering the question from the previous chapter, motion can be considered to be the soul of the mechanical. Even etymologically the words anima (soul in latin) — animal — animation are cognate. And sometimes the type of movement itself, more than the appearance, can resemble a human.
Digital mechanisms, primitive or not, can resemble humans in various actions, such as dancing. Creators of dancing Boston Dynamics robots did not try to make robots similar to people in any aspect, except for mechanical: the structure of the figure, movement. But even this is enough to make commentators call the dance “super cute and wholesome :)”. In a viral Russian meme, someone put a voice-over of mechanical voices on the Boston dynamics robots footage. Situations in the video are taken from everyday life, robots call humans skin bastards and seem to look down on them and it makes the sketch comical.
Why do humans find dancing machines so appealing? These mechanisms try to imitate human behaviour and so far they are not that advanced to fully impersonate the human being so their quirky attempts can be seen as something interesting and even cute:
“The rigid mechanism which we occasionally detect, as a foreign body, in the living continuity of human affairs is of peculiar interest to us as being a kind of absentmindedness on the part of life” (Bergson, 1921: 87).
Not only robots can resemble humans: sometimes imitate the mechanisms themselves. Early Big Dog quadruped robot testing video parody — as if showing the early prototypes of the Boston Dynamics Dog robot, while in reality it's just people pretending to be robots.
“A mechanical inelasticity where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being” (Bergson, 1921: 10) became the inspiration for a separate genre of comedy, famous performers of which were Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati.
Jacques Tati
Mon Oncle
Mon Oncle
Charlie Chaplin
Feeding Machine
Feeding Machine