I was most struck by this passage in Henri Bergson’s ‘Laughter: an essay on the meaning of the comic’, as at face value it seems entirely wrong to me. As Michael North’s ‘Machine-age Comedy’ says by quoting Chaplin, “[laughter is] the most international and the most revolutionary emotion of the masses”. Although Bergson is only attempting to discuss laughter as a response to the comedy of that time – rudimentary comedy at that, as early cinema had no access to the full breadth of comedic techniques we have developed since – there are other kinds of laughter (from joy, from desperation) that show how intrisically linked with emotions it is, just as not all tears come from sadness. Thinking about my personal sensibilities, the films that most succeed at inducing me into fits of laughter are also the ones that reduce me to tears; it is precisely sentimentality and the extremity of emotion that creates comedy.
But I’d like to run with the idea and explore the implications of Bergson’s argument in Star Wars, as it is in the two opposing ideologies where Bergson’s argument seems to have credence. In the Sith (dark side), they draw on their emotions for power, and it is this over emotionality that leads to them waging intergalactic conflicts; there is little room for anything other than hate, so comedy is entirely absent from their lives. On the other hand, the Jedi (light side) preach an absence of emotion, their rationality bringing them peace; precisely because they are not overwhelmed by emotion at every moment, they are often seen cracking jokes, as expressed by the banter between Obi-wan and Anakin. When the latter character changes sides – and, in essence, abandons his intelligence for the sake of emotion – he loses all sense of good humour, immediately becoming a deadly force of despair. Bergson thus seems to be correct in his assessment, at least as far as such reasoning can be translated to Star Wars.
I think you make a really important and valid point that our emotional responses to films are much more complex and multi-dimensional than Bergson implies, and that comedy film do not all elicit the same kinds of laughter. I am also very intrigued by your idea that comedy is caused by extremity of emotion; though I would typically associate extreme emotions with opposite genres like tragedy and drama, I do understand your point. Do you think that comedy can ever become too extreme and veer too close to these other genres? And can a film be described solely as a comedy if it has the power to make us simultaneously laugh and cry, or does it become more difficult to define?