Upon first reading Bergson’s assertion that the comic’s “appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple,” I instinctively disagreed with the outright and rather sweeping dismissal of emotion (5). As a bleak, understated tragedy about grief, loss, and family with some undeniably funny moments, Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (2016) came to mind. Comedy and emotions may, in my view, not only coexist but perhaps depend on each other for the complete catharsis of their respective effects.
In one darkly amusing scene, teenage Patrick walks in on his uncle, Lee, contemplatively facing a gun cabinet, and wryly asks, “Who are you going to shoot, you or me?” In another scene, Patrick jokingly suggests preserving his father’s corpse in the backseat of the car because of how cold it is. These remarks, while witty in their own right, are amusing because of rather than in the absence of their emotional contexts. Lee has proven himself to be impulsively violent at times, so while Patrick is, of course, kidding, the threat of his joke is not entirely baseless. The pain of this possibility makes the joke strangely more laughable than if it had lacked stakes–it may have retained some of its basic cleverness but would lose the boldness that makes it laughable. It is the very complexity of his grief that brings the complicated yet cathartic feeling of amusement, not the pure intellect of his statement. His morose yet crucially lighthearted feigned indifference is what makes it funny. Perhaps, then, Bergson is right to the extent that Patrick has transformed himself into an indifferent observer of his own pain, but that indifference is only amusing insofar as we understand it to be a mask.
However, “sympathy,” as Bergson uses the term, more refers to a sort of sensory attentiveness and care wherein “you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance” (5). Despite the emotional impact, there is indeed a coldness imposed as Patrick’s father’s corpse is rendered a lifeless object with no particular importance. This mechanization of the body, the making of it into a thing, seems in agreement with Bergson. What remains in question to me, however, is how much of that coldness, that mechanical transformation, is a representation of grief that thus makes the comical inextricable from the emotional.
Works Cited
Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. The Macmillan Company, 1911. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/laughteranessay00berggoog.
I really like your outlook on “Manchester by the Sea”, I have never thought of it as a film about the mechanization of grief: I completely agree with your point of view, but I also personally think that Lonergan merges grief and “comedy” to show how Patrick uses irony as a coping mechanism to accept his father’s death.
In my opinion jokes paradoxically make grief and loss even more emotional because they show the difference between Patrick and Lee and how they grieve and try to cope the loss of a loved one: I feel like Patrick makes jokes about his father’s death to emotionally detach himself from what happened.
I found your take on Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea to be inherently refreshing, as I’d not seen that film in quite a bit – and it reminded me again of Bergson’s assumption on the comic being ‘inelastic’ to societal expectations. In this case, I guess Bergson would’ve maybe argued that Patrick’s constant inhibition to humour the situation stems from his rigidity to the norm of grieving, perhaps motivated by an unconscious of denial instead of acceptance. The laughter that comes from watching black comedies, I’d think, would be to relieve ourselves of the inherent pain which comes with dealing with darker situations of the human condition – and in this case, it’s Patrick rigidity to conformity that strikes us as funny due to it feeling very human, and perhaps even automatic, as he seems to be carrying on as if regular life was still in occurrence.