Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Dodo Press)

Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941) was a major French philosopher, influential in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1901 Felix Alcan published a work which had previously appeared in the Revue de Paris, entitled Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Le Rire), one of the most important of Bergson's minor productions. This essay on the meaning of comedy was based on a lecture which he had given in his early days in the Auvergne. The study of it is essential to an understanding of Bergson's views of life, and its passages dealing with the place of the artistic in life are valuable. A presidential address, The Meaning of the War (1915), was delivered in December, 1914, to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. He also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.