Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Henri Bergson
Published 1900 · 90 pages · 38,973 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic to read?
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Bergson writes in an authorized English translation aimed at a broadly educated audience — the essay originally appeared in the Revue de Paris, a general cultural magazine, which accounts for its deliberate accessibility. Specialized philosophical terms appear (inelasticity, automatism, rigidity) but are defined through examples rather than imported from technical tradition. French comic proper nouns (Molière, La Bruyère, Sganarelle, Menalque) require cultural context but no dictionary.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- The sentences run at moderate length with clear subordination — closer to Huxley's essayistic clarity than to Proustian complexity. Bergson builds arguments through careful qualification and analogy, producing paragraphs that accumulate step by step. The translation by Brereton and Rothwell preserves a Victorian expository cadence, with occasional long periodic sentences, but none resist parsing on a careful first read.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- Laughter operates almost entirely in the register of abstract argument. Bergson's central thesis — that the comic arises from 'mechanical inelasticity' encrusted on living flexibility — is developed through conceptual reasoning rather than phenomenological description. Concrete examples (the man who falls in the street, the absentminded professor, Molière's misers) serve as illustrations of abstract principles, not ends in themselves. Readers are asked to sustain philosophical claims across long chains of inference.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- The essay packs a dense sequence of distinctions per page: the difference between comedy and drama, form versus matter in comic characters, the three main targets of comic energy (persons, situations, language). Each chapter advances the central thesis while multiplying its conceptual branchings. Literary and theatrical examples from French tradition are deployed at speed, assuming some familiarity with Molière, Racine, and Victorian comedy.
How Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic is regarded
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic holds a literary regard score of 78 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.