The man took the palm of my left hand with his left hand, pulled four fingers to the ground, and his right arm clenched his fist and aimed it at me with four phalanges connected to the palms, and I saw that the sharp bulges at the joints of those phalanges were now white. The bones slid left and right under the skin, like a beast grinding a round of teeth, and then, as if it had been violently ejected by a spring, his fists struck out continuously, hitting the back of my hand.
The brain told me for the first time that it was pain, quite a pain. Before the boy was finished, he took my somewhat numb hand in his own hand—barely able to hold it firmly, rolling back and forth like a bunch of chopsticks, bones squeezing together and making a crunching sound. But at this moment, his cruel gaze suddenly became hollow: he saw me laughing, first a hey laugh, then a laugh.
Bergson
So he let go of his hand. I just want to laugh, I laugh from the bottom of my heart, I laugh all over the place. Later I learned that my laughter had made his behavior suddenly lose its meaning, and that his expected pleasure had not only failed, but had not been able to translate into any other emotion, such as jealousy or more violent irritation. Of course, he wasn't depressed, but the pleasure had turned to zero.
This is the same table I had when I was in middle school. At that time, several sports school students were placed in the class, and he was one of them. Unlike other transfer students, he has no rustic atmosphere, his hair is yellowed and curly, his face is inverted trapezoidal, and his voice is light. When he sat down next to me, I felt that his breath was different from others, not without reservation, inhaling-spitting-sucking, but inhaling loud, exhaling so small that it was too small to be heard, and something seemed to be brewing in the exchange of breaths.
Basketball players are naturally not attracted to me, I usually avoid, but the boy, I can't avoid him, he sits next to me, one is not strong, the other is not smart, yellow hair, small face, thin voice constitutes a threatening pattern, like a bee that is about to sting when it is accurate. Many people have seen him just pounding the trunk of a tree. As a result, at one point, he told me that he had tendonitis in his hands.
I asked him what tendonitis was, and he clenched his fists and told me that there were tendons inside the wrist, here and there. Here and there, some rushing little things are restless, inflamed... Thinking of this, I laughed a little. It was this laugh that offended my tablemates. He offered to let me eat his punch so that I could also experience the pain in my tendons.
In Laughter, Bergson says that if we laugh when we see a person fall, it's because the person who falls is not really acting as a person at the moment of falling, he is actually acting in a mechanical way. If it is a person, then the person will avoid what makes him trip, and the machine, after being programmed, will not work around. In cartoons like Tom and Jerry (which is not Bergson's words), one of the funniest routines is that the cat climbs up the ladder, the steps are over, and he continues in his usual movements, clutching his hands and feet in the air until he looks down and then slips down. This is precisely the antics caused by mechanical behavior.
Comedy happens when man becomes a prisoner and victim of habit. Bergson's comedic theory is completely consistent with his philosophy of life-cosmology. The universe, like a huge cable car ropeway, we sit in the upward cable car, and our sanity is the gaze cast by the downhill cable car that is wrong. (In the previous Feng's New Year films, the use of mechanically uniformly advanced cable cars to create jokes, one person in the car can only stare at the people in the other car who are wrong) Bergson believes that we should focus on our own cable cars – this is instinct or "life intuition", which is higher than reason.
So why did I laugh so much that day when I was in pain?
Of course I laughed at him, his movements were mechanical, he was so serious, he hit the back of my hand like a sandbag or a tree trunk. But I also switched from focusing on the opposite cable car to focusing on myself, and I laughed unconsciously. This kind of concentration is actually a subconscious distraction in the face of evil that has no room for maneuver, and I am free from the rules of the game laid out by evil. Evildoers are often happy to be bumped, and they also enjoy retreating, avoiding and begging for forgiveness, only the kind of real distraction, the kind of whimsy that makes them doubt the meaning of their actions.
A comic illustration of Bergson's "life instincts"
The world of men is full of funny things, because the world is full of rules-abiding people: the rules of law and order, the rules of discourse, the rules of thought, and the rules of morality—make people act in the same way, stiff, and at the same time unaware of being rigid by the rules. Acting by the rules, talking to stereotypes, relying on those habits, is itself comical, and funny and varied. In the "group mockery" incident, the group mockery of others is the funniest themselves, because they take the initiative to drill into the rules and become mechanical. One of Bergson's formulas is that man becomes a machine = funny.
Comedy is about genres. The funny man I see is because I think of him as one of a certain kind of people; and the tragedy is individual. A tragedy must be titled after someone' name: King Lear, Hamlet, Antigone, Othello, who is given a depth of character; the title of a comedy is often some type of person, such as Sleepwalker, The Bridegroom and the like. The type of person is not a person, has lost his personality and depth, and the funny thing about man is this--the man who hit me is like a boxing puppet with a good string, he is not like a person; in turn, the funny thing about animals is that they are like people, such as bears begging for food, tickling and frowning monkeys.
Shouldn't you laugh? In the face of the unknown crowd under this clear sky, shouldn't I laugh at it? Bergson, the Frenchman who always had a serious expression, never exhorted to be humble and restrained, not to laugh at others, to say that it was immoral; no. He said that if I see the amusement of others by reason, it means that I see the "non-human" in others, so my laughter is actually affirming the real person, that is, the person who can choose what kind of person he wants to be.
This is a treasure that Henley Bergson, the Frenchman who won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature, taught me.
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