20 mins read
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 lowercase spelling).