Abstract

It was in the year of Nietzsche’s death that Bergson published Laughter, but he had been thinking about the subject while Nietzsche was alive and active. In 1884 he delivered a lecture, “Le rire: de quoi rit-on? Pourquoi rit-on?”; the book Le Rire grew from that lecture and enlarged its inquiry into what one laughs at and why, even if the book still does not probe deeply enough into who that “one” is who’s laughing.