Content
  1. Introduction
  2. Humour and laughter
  3. Steel mechanisms and “skin bastards
  4. Laughter + non-human
  5. Laughter as a mechanism
  6. Body, mechanism, laughter: examples from Digital Media
  7. Conclusion
  8. References

Written and designed by Nilya Musaeva in 2021
My website
DM Bremen website
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Conclusion Laughter is hard to grasp. Funny is better perceived on the fly, as soon as we try to curb and explain the comic, it becomes “heavier” and loses its "springiness". Perhaps because of this, there are so many unknowns in theories and mechanisms of humour. However, people keep on producing artworks that are comic in all the fields of media. Most likely they are guided by their instinct, sense of what is funny and what is not.

The initial question standing behind this research was: “why human beings appreciate quick and efficient solutions but still get fascinated with bulky solutions?” This led the research towards an understanding of what funny is.

Bergson lived at a time when digital media barely existed. The first example of the artwork mentioned in this paper dates itself 13 years after his essay. However, his theory supported the idea that machines can be the source of the comic. It is outstanding how the mechanisms described in the paper were later used in digital media artworks. It is still uncertain whether this coincidence was purely accidental or deliberate.

After these inspiring coincidences, I tried to analyse the most commonly spread theories of humour and compare them to primitive mechanisms. Then I carried on with researching the corresponding artworks based on these mechanisms. These are not all examples of how laughter is created in digital media, however, this is the beginning of further reflection and research on this topic. What can be studied further is the reaction to various materials used in digital media, different perceptions on humour, not only the Western one, as well as expansion of the catalog of authors working with humour in digital media.


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